“We at WHO have enough information that very clearly indicates that (omicron. – Vedomosti) is spreading extremely quickly, the number of cases doubles every two to three days,” Nabarro said. According to him, it will be possible to avoid high mortality in such conditions only with great luck.
Nabarro noted that the current situation with the incidence of coronavirus is “very serious.” He added that it is necessary to continue to vaccinate people and carry out revaccinations. Also, all people need to reduce social contacts to reduce the spread of coronavirus.
Earlier, scientists from the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Hong Kong reported that omicron spreads 70 times faster than another strain of COVID-19 – the delta. At the same time, the omicron spreads in the human lungs 10 times slower than the variant of the coronavirus that started the pandemic, the researchers found. In their opinion, this may indicate an easier course of COVID-19 when infected with a new strain.
Omicron was discovered in southern Africa in the first decade of November. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), this strain carries 32 mutations – more than any previously known. The head of Rospotrebnadzor, Anna Popova, explained that a large number of mutations increases the infectiousness of the infection. Earlier, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova, citing world experts, said that a patient with this strain is capable of infecting three more people, while with a delta that was identified in India earlier and became dominant in the world – 0.8 people. In Russia, the first two cases of omicron infection were recorded on December 6 among citizens who returned from South Africa. Now there are 16 of them.
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