WHO says omicron death toll is ‘more than tragic’

After the emergence of the omicron variant, half a million deaths from Covid-19 were recorded in the world despite vaccination, a balance “more than tragic”, according to the WHO (World Health Organization).

“While everyone said that the omicron was lighter, they didn’t realize that half a million people had died since the variant was detected,” noted WHO incident manager Abdi Mahamud. “In the era of effective vaccines, half a million people die, this is really something more than tragic”, he added, during a meeting, this Tuesday (8), promoted by the organization via social networks.

According to Mahamud, there have been 130 million cases and 500,000 deaths worldwide since Ômicron was considered a concern by the WHO at the end of November. Covid-19 has killed 5.75 million people since December 2019, according to an AFP balance sheet based on official sources.

The omicron was discovered in late November 2021, in South Africa, by a team of researchers led by Brazilian Túlio de Oliveira, from Krisp (KwaZulu-Natal Research and Innovation Sequencing Platform), at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, in Africa. do Sul. Oliveira’s team was also responsible for identifying and warning about another variant of concern: beta.

Since its discovery, the omicron was considered to be extremely transmissible and the possibility of reinfection and some degree of vaccine leakage began to be documented. At the same time, the variant ended up being less aggressive than the delta, which wreaked havoc around the world. Despite this, there were already warnings that the enormous transmission capacity could lead to large numbers of deaths.

In the US, omicron-derived deaths are as plentiful as those caused by the delta variant, averaging over 2,000 deaths per day.​

In Brazil, the arrival of the omicron also led to an explosion of cases, overloading health systems, and days with more than a thousand deaths, with the moving average of deaths still rising.