Covid-19: Cases may be declining, but no country out of the woods yet, says WHO

The World Health Organization has said that even though there is a decline in the single-day count of Covid-19 cases, the risk of people contracting the virus persists as it did before, PTI reported on Saturday.

Poonam Khetrapal Singh, regional director of WHO for South-East Asia, said that no country, irrespective of their current transmission scenario, was “out of the woods” yet.

Singh added that government should focus on reducing transmission and implementing situation-specific measures.

“We need to continue to remain vigilant,” Singh told PTI. “Our focus must be on reducing transmission…and increasing vaccine coverage. That is the way forward for all countries in the ongoing pandemic.”

According to the WHO official, data suggests that Omicron may have a lower risk of hospitalization when compared to the Delta variant, but the severity of illness increases with age and comorbidities.

On January 27, the Union health ministry had said that there are early indications of Covid-19 infections plateauing in some parts of the country but the trend needs to be monitored.

Join Secretary Lav Agarwal had said that a clear trend of fewer patients requiring oxygen support or intensive care unit beds was observed.

Meanwhile, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on January 24 had said it was not right to assume that Omicron was the last variant of coronavirus or that the world was in the “endgame” of this pandemic.

Currently, India is witnessing the third wave of coronavirus pandemic.

On Saturday, India recorded 2,35,532 new cases of coronavirus, taking the total number of cases to 4,08,58,241 since the pandemic began in January 2020. In the past 24 hours, 613 people died due to the virus, taking the official toll to 4,92,940.

There are 20,04,333 active cases in the country currently, and active infections declined by 1,01,278 in the past day.