The emergency committee of the World Health Organization (WHO) will meet on Thursday, ahead of schedule, to discuss the variants of the new coronavirus, which are more contagious and have worried authorities worldwide.
The committee’s meetings normally take place every three months, but “this time the director-general called the members two weeks ahead of schedule to analyze matters that need urgent debate. These are the recent variants and the use of certificates of vaccination and testing for international travel, “explains a WHO statement released this Wednesday in Geneva.
The committee of experts, chaired by French Didier Houssin, will meet on Thursday, January 14, and recommendations for WHO and member countries will be published after the meeting, the statement said.
The coronavirus variants initially identified in the United Kingdom and South Africa are particularly contagious and are now circulating in dozens of countries, with a new wave of contamination and feedlots pending vaccination campaigns.
According to the WHO, the number of countries and territories where the British variant has already been detected is 50 and the variant identified in South Africa appeared in 20, but the organization considers that this assessment may be underestimated.
A third mutation, originating in the Brazilian Amazon and whose discovery was announced on Sunday by Japan, is currently being analyzed and may impact the immune response, according to WHO, which speaks in its weekly bulletin in a “worrying variant”.
The covid-19 pandemic caused at least 1,963,557 deaths resulting from more than 91.5 million cases of infection worldwide, according to a report made by the French agency AFP.
The disease is transmitted by a new coronavirus detected in late December 2019 in Wuhan, a city in central China.
Source: Correio da Manhã by www.cmjornal.pt.
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