Covid variant ravaging India present in 44 countries: WHO
GENEVA: The World Health Organization (WHO) said on Wednesday that a variant of Covid-19 behind the acceleration of India’s explosive outbreak has been found in dozens of countries all over the world.
The UN health agency said the B.1.617 variant of Covid-19, first found in India in October, had been detected in more than 4,500 samples uploaded to an open-access database “from 44 countries in all six WHO regions”.
“And the WHO has received reports of detections from five additional countries,” it said in its weekly epidemiological update on the pandemic.
Outside of India, it said that Britain had reported the largest number of Covid cases caused by the variant. Earlier this week, the WHO declared B.1.617 - which counts three so-called sub-lineages with slightly different mutations and characteristics - as a “variant of concern”. The WHO explained on Wednesday that B.1.617 was added to the list because it appears to be transmitting more easily than the original virus, pointing to the “rapid increases in prevalence in multiple countries”.
The WHO also pointed to “preliminary evidence” that the variant was more resistant to treatment with the monoclonal antibody Bamlanivimab, and also highlighted early lab studies indicating “limited reduction in neutralisation by antibodies”.
It stressed, though, that “realworld impacts” on the effectiveness of vaccines against the variant for instance “may be limited”.
Catastrophe could have been prevented: Panel
An independent global panel concluded on Wednesday that the catastrophic scale of the Covid-19
pandemic could have been prevented, but a “toxic cocktail” of dithering and poor coordination meant the warning signs went unheeded.
The Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response (IPPPR) said a series of bad decisions meant Covid-19 went on to kill at least 3.3 million people so far and devastate the global economy.
Institutions “failed to protect people” and science-denying leaders eroded public trust in health interventions, the IPPPR said in its long-awaited final report.
Early responses to the outbreak detected in Wuhan, China in December 2019 “lacked urgency”, with February 2020 a costly “lost month” as countries failed to heed the alarm, said the panel.
To tackle the coronavirus pandemic, it called on the richest countries to donate a billion vaccine doses to the poorest.