The United Nations agency said that more than 18 million new cases were reported this week across the six WHO regions. According to the WHO, the previous week saw a 50 percent increase in the confirmed COVID-19 cases.
However, in its weekly report, it cautioned that "despite a slowdown of the increase in case incidence at the global level, all regions reported an increase in the incidence of weekly cases with the exception of the African Region, which reported a 27 percent decrease."
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus stated Tuesday that the highly infectious omicron variant "continues to sweep the world," according to an Associated Press report.
While he acknowledged that some regions appear to have passed the peak of the latest Omicron wave, Tedros warned that "not all countries are out of the woods yet," as per the newswire.
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The report noted that Southeast Asia saw the largest rise in coronavirus cases last week, with new confirmed cases rising by about 145 percent. The Middle East saw a 68 percent rise in weekly cases.
The WHO pointed out that the Americas and Europe both had the smallest increases, standing at 17 and 10 percent, respectively.
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The news comes as the U.S. has also seen its COVID-19 case numbers start to plateau. Daily case reports in Cleveland, Newark, and Washington, D.C., have also steadily declined after each of the cities saw record-breaking spikes over the past month, as reported by The New York Times.
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U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy told CNN on Sunday that "There are parts of the country — New York, in particular, and other parts of the Northeast — where we are starting to see a plateau, and in some cases, an early decline in cases."
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Nearly a month after Sheba Medical Center in Israel launched a landmark study to test the efficacy of a fourth COVID shot, the hospital announced Monday that this fourth booster was only partially effective in protecting against the Omicron strain.
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“The vaccine, which was very effective against the previous strains, is less effective against the Omicron strain,” Prof. Gili Regev-Yochay, a lead researcher in the experiment said.
Hours after releasing the results, Sheba published a statement calling for “continuing the vaccination drive for risk groups at this time, even though the vaccine doesn’t provide optimal protection against getting infected with the variant.”
Hebrew media reported that the hospital was pressured into issuing that statement after the Health Ministry didn’t like the publication of the study’s initial results.
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