New Delhi:
With India and the rest of the world witnessing a steep spike in COVID-19 cases, the World Health Organization (WHO) Wednesday warned of a “tsunami” of Omicron and Delta COVID-19 cases will “push health systems towards the brink of collapse”.
The health body said the Delta and Omicron “variants of concern” were “twin threats” that were driving numbers of new case numbers to record highs, and therefore, resulting in surge in hospitalisations and deaths.
“I am highly concerned that Omicron, being more transmissible, circulating at the same time as Delta, is leading to a tsunami of cases,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said.
“This is and will continue to put immense pressure on exhausted health workers, and health systems on the brink of collapse,” he added.
Tedros said the pressure on health systems was due to new patients of COVID-19 and large numbers of health workers falling ill with the virus. “The unvaccinated are many times more at risk of dying from either variant,” he added.
Notably, health systems across the world are already being stretched to their limits. Now, the latest statement by the WHO comes within days after it said that the overall risk related to the new COVID-19 variant Omicron remains very high.
On Tuesday, the UN health agency had also said the rising cases of Omicron could lead to overwhelmed healthcare systems even though early studies suggest it leads to milder disease.
In its weekly epidemiological report released late on Tuesday (December 28), the WHO said there were nearly 4.99 million newly reported cases around the world from December 20-26.
Meanwhile, several states across the India have imposed restrictions including imposing night curfew to restrict the spread of Delta and Omicron variants of COVID-19. Almost all states and Union Territories in the country have been reporting massive surge in cases of coronavirus in the last few days.
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