New COVID variant could emerge amid drop in surveillance, vaccination, WHO warns
Global News
A growing decline in COVID-19 surveillance and vaccination could open the door to a new variant of concern, the World Health Organization says.
World health authorities are closer than ever to being able to declare the emergency phase of COVID-19 over, but a growing decline in surveillance and vaccination could open the door to a new variant of concern, says the World Health Organization (WHO).
There are many tools available to protect individuals from severe illness and to track the virus and the ways it continues to mutate, but gaps in testing, sequencing and vaccination for COVID-19 continue to create “the perfect conditions for a new variant of concern to emerge that could cause significant mortality,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said during a briefing Friday.
“We are much closer to being able to say that the emergency phase of the pandemic is over, but we are not there yet,” he said.
It also means detailed information about how the virus is changing and behaving continues to be vital, he added.
For the last several months, WHO officials have been urging countries to beef up tracking, testing and sequencing of COVID-19, following a marked decline in surveillance measures as public health restrictions have been relaxed worldwide.
WHO has also added caveats to its weekly epidemiological reports on global COVID-19 circulation and case numbers, noting that any trends “should be interpreted with due consideration of the limitations of the COVID-19 surveillance systems.”
“These (limitations) include differences in sequencing capacity and sampling strategies between countries, changes in sampling strategies over time, reductions in tests conducted and sequences shared by countries, and delays in sequence submission,” the WHO said in its weekly epidemiological update on Nov. 30.
Collecting data on how the virus is moving through populations and conducting genomic surveillance is essential to monitor changes in COVID-19 and identify possible new variants of concern, said Maria Van Kerkhove, an infectious disease epidemiologist who serves as the WHO’s technical lead for the COVID-19 response.
