Omicron becomes dominant strain in US,UK,decling in Africa

The World Health Organization has categorised the risks related to the Omicron variant as very high in its Covid-19 weekly epidemiological update released on Wednesday. South Africa, the country which first detected the variant on November 24, is seeing a decline in the number of Omicron cases, the WHO report said, possibly indicating that the surge is over for the time being. The overall number of Covid-19 cases increased by 11% in the week between December 20 and 26 as compared to the previous week, with the US region reporting the largest increase (39%), followed by the African region (7%). The South-East Asia region continued to report a decrease in the new cases, the WHO observed. But the overall risk related to the new variant of concern Omicron remains very high.

Though Omicron is leading to fewer hospitalisation, Omicron cases are increasing rapidly and the variant has become the dominant strain in the United Kingdom and the United States. Covid-19 hospitalisations in New York state are accelerating at a rate that hasn't been seen since the early days of the pandemic, reports said. On Tuesday the state said hospitalizations rose by 647 to 6,173, marking the largest daily increase since early April 2020, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The total number of New Yorkers hospitalized with the virus remains far below last year’s peak of almost 19,000.

Meanwhile,in US, California became the first state to record more than 5 million known coronavirus infections, according to the state dashboard Tuesday, The first coronavirus case in California was confirmed Jan. 25, 2020. It took 292 days to get to 1 million infections on Nov. 11 of that year, and 44 days from then to top 2 million.California’s caseload is also ahead of other large states. Texas had more than 4.4 million and Florida topped 3.9 million as of Sunday. California has recorded more than 75,500 deaths related to Covid-19.