There are no fixed borders between a pandemic, when a pathogen is new to humans and causing wide scale disease and often high levels of death, and the ensuing endemic phase, when the disease has settled into something that our immune systems can better cope with, explained Marc Lipsitch, an infectious diseases epidemiologist at the Harvard School of Public Health.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has been tracking health system impacts since the early days of the pandemic, and its latest survey of countries shows that health services are starting to recover, according to new findings..
“If the world does not learn from our past mistakes with COVID, then future generations will question what we did to improve from the pandemic,” he said.
Though COVID-19 cases and deaths continued to decline over the past 4 weeks, the World Health Organization (WHO) is tracking rises in two of its regions, South East Asia and the Eastern Mediterranean. In its weekly update today, it also noted rises in individual countries in other parts of the world.
The World Health Organization (WHO) this week boosted the XBB.1.16 Omicron subvariant to a variant of interest (VOI) from a variant under monitoring (VUM), based on the latest assessments from its technical advisory group on virus evolution.
The subvariant is fueling India's biggest surge in about 7 months, and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported another jump in the proportion of XBB.1.16 viruses.
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