The World Health Organization (WHO) has warned that the Delta variant of the novel coronavirus will become the dominant variant globally in the coming months. The global health agency said the highly transmissible strain is now present in nearly 100 countries as per conservative estimates and might become dominant in few months.
In its Covid-19 Weekly Epidemiological Update as on June 29, the WHO said cases of the Delta variant have been reported in 96 countries and “though this is likely an underestimate as sequencing capacities needed to identify variants are limited”.
“A number of these countries are attributing surges in infections and hospitalisations to this variant,” the WHO said, adding, “A number of these countries are attributing surges in infections and hospitalisations to this variant.”
The WHO warned that the Delta variant is “expected to rapidly outcompete other variants”.
“Given the increase in transmissibility, the Delta variant is expected to rapidly outcompete other variants and become the dominant variant over the coming months,” the WHO said in its weekly report.
The WHO also noted that the tools that exist today to combat the coronavirus — individual, community level-public health and social measures, infection prevention and control measures that have been used since the beginning of the pandemic — remain effective against current variants of concern (VOCs), including the Delta variant.
However the WHO in its weekly update also noticed a slight overall decrease in COVID cases. As per reprort at 521,298, the highest numbers of new Covid-19 cases were reported from Brazil during the June 21-27 week, followed by India (351,218 new cases, a 12 per cent increase over the previous week), Colombia (204,132 new cases, 5 per cent increase), Russia (134,465 new cases, 24 per cent increase) and Argentina (131,824 new cases, 11 per cent decrease).
“There is a slight overall decrease in the number of cases reported this week, mostly due to the decrease in the number of cases reported in India,” the update said.
Raising concerns over the continuously mutating coronavirus, the WHO said, “SARS-CoV-2 [the virus that causes Covid-19 disease] will continue to evolve, with selective advantage generally favouring more transmissible variants.
