Fears escalate as new Covid strains spread

WHO warns of bigger outbreaks as nations struggle with a winter spike in Covid cases

JOHANNESBURG/MOSCOW: South Africa banned alcohol sales and made masks mandatory in public from Tuesday after a surge in coronavirus cases in the country, even as the World Health Organization (WHO) warned that pandemics far deadlier than Covid-19 may lie ahead.

The UN health agency’s chilling warning came amid rising fears of more damage from the coronavirus disease after Japan and Pakistan became the latest countries to report new mutations of the Covid-19 virus.

Nations around the world are struggling with winter spikes in infections that have pushed the global caseload close to 81 million, while the roll-out of coronavirus vaccines gathers pace in North America and Europe.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa on Monday announced a ban on selling alcohol and said face masks will be compulsory in public after his nation became the first in Africa to record one million cases.

Surging cases also forced Rio de Janeiro - one of Brazil’s worsthit cities - to announce on Monday that they will block access to beaches on December 31 to prevent large crowds from celebrating New Year’s Eve.

The WHO warned that worse pandemics could like ahead, urging the world to get serious about preparedness. “This is a wake-up call,” WHO emergencies chief Michael Ryan told reporters. “This pandemic... has spread around the world extremely quickly and it has affected every corner of this planet, but this is not necessarily the big one. We need to get ready for something that may even be more severe in the future.”

Japan on Monday detected a new variant of the virus found in South Africa, the government said, the first such discovery in a nation that has already identified more than a dozen cases of another variant that is spreading rapidly in Britain.

Pakistan has confirmed its first case of the new variant found in the UK after it identified the strain in three samples taken from passengers who had returned from Britain.

Russia has said that its coronavirus death toll was more than three times higher than it had previously reported, making it the country with the third-largest number of fatalities.

The Rosstat statistics agency said the number of deaths from all causes recorded between January and November had risen by 229,700 compared to the previous year. “More than 81% of this increase in mortality over this period is due to Covid,” said deputy PM Tatiana Golikova, meaning that over 186,000 Russians have died from Covid-19.

In the UK, official figures showed more people are currently hospitalised with Covid-19 in England than at the first peak of the outbreak in the spring.

There were 20,426 patients in hospitals as of Monday morning compared to the previous high of 18,974 on April 12. Simon Stevens, chief executive of the NHS, said health workers are back in “the eye of the storm” as they had been in the spring.