WHO estimates that 90% of the world’s population already have immunity to Covid

The WHO (World Health Organization) said this Friday (2) that about 90% of the world’s population currently has some level of immunity to Covid-19. The entity also warned of the threat of a new variant.

“WHO estimates that at least 90% of the world’s population now have some level of immunity to Sars-CoV-2 due to a previous infection or vaccination,” said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, referring to the virus. that causes the disease.

“We are much closer to being able to say that the emergency phase of the pandemic is over, but we are not there yet,” added Tedros.

The director-general of the WHO warned that the reduction in surveillance of contagions is opening the doors to a new variant of the virus, which could overcome the dominant omicron.

“Gaps in surveillance, testing, sequencing and vaccination continue to create the perfect conditions for the emergence of a worrying new variant that can cause significant mortality,” he said.

Tedros recalled that last weekend it was a year since the WHO reported the emergence of omicron, a more contagious variant.

Currently, there are more than 500 subvariants of omicron and all are highly transmissible. There are also mutations that allow them to escape immunity more easily, reinforced Tedros.

The WHO has counted more than 640 million officially confirmed cases of Covid, a number that is presumed to be much lower than the real one, as well as the official number of deaths, of 6.6 million in the world.

Last week more than 8,500 Covid deaths were recorded, Tedros said. A number that “is not acceptable” after three years of the pandemic, when “we already have so many tools to prevent infections and save lives”.