115,000 health workers lost lives to Covid: WHO
WHO monitoring new mutation of Delta variant reported in some countries
ACCORDING to estimates by the World Health Organization (WHO), around 115,000 health care worldwide could have died of Covid-19 in the first 16 months of the pandemic.
The UN health agency attributes this figure, which spans January 2020 to May of this year, to poorly equipped facilities, especially at the beginning of the pandemic, and insufficient distribution of vaccines in developing countries.
In Africa, only 10 per cent of health workers have been vaccinated against the coronavirus, compared to 80 per cent in most rich countries.
WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus appealed on Thursday to the largest economies, the G20, to make new efforts for a fairer distribution of vaccines at its summit in Rome on October 30.
For months the WHO has called for no booster vaccinations to be given, except for particularly vulnerable people, while millions of people in poor countries await their first dose. That appeal was ignored, Tedros said.
“High- and upper-middle income countries have now administered almost half as many booster shots as the total number of vaccines administered in low-income countries,” he said.
The WHO aims for 40 per cent of people in every country to be vaccinated by the end of the year. For this, 500 million vaccine doses are needed, as much as is normally produced in around 10 days.
ut much of it goes, according to the WHO, to rich countries that are setting aside the shots for booster campaigns.
It could be difficult for 82 countries to hit the 40 per cent target, Tedros said. In threequarters of these countries, the only problem is that not enough vaccine is available.
Meanwhile, The World Health Organization (WHO) said that it is monitoring a new form of the coronavirus Delta variant. The virus, named AY4.2, has two additional mutations, the WHO said on Thursday. Recently, experts had reported a minor outbreak of the variant in ritain. Russia also recorded its first cases, according to a report by the Interfax news agency.
There have also been cases of AY4.2 reported in the United States, Denmark, and Germany. Germany’s Robert Koch Institute for disease control and prevention reported that the Delta subvariant has been detected about 280 times in the country since the July.
Only a small proportion of Germany’s coronavirus samples are tested for virus variants. ut the institute says assessments indicate that the prevalence remains very low.
Researchers do not yet believe that the mutated variant could be significantly more contagious than the original Delta variant, which was first detected in India in late 2020. It is now the dominant strain worldwide.