Geneva:
Delta has all but elbowed out the 3 other Covid-19 variants of concern, which now represent a tiny fraction of the samples getting sequenced, the WHO mentioned Tuesday.
“Less than one percent each of Alpha, Beta and Gamma are currently circulating. It’s really predominantly Delta around the world,” mentioned Maria Van Kerkhove, the World Health Organization’s technical lead on Covid-19.
Delta “has become more fit, it is more transmissible and it is out-competing, it is replacing the other viruses that are circulating,” she told a WHO social media live interaction, adding that Delta had been detected in more than 185 nations to date.
All viruses mutate more than time, like SARS-CoV-2, the virus which causes Covid-19 illness.
During late 2020, the emergence of variants that posed an elevated danger to worldwide public wellness prompted the WHO to get started characterising them as variants of interest, and the more-worrying variants of concern, to inform the response to the pandemic.
The UN wellness agency decided to name the variants immediately after the letters of the Greek alphabet, to prevent the nations that 1st detected them getting stigmatised.
Besides the 4 variants of concern, there are also 5 variants of interest, but Van Kerkhove mentioned 3 of them — Eta, Iota and Kappa — had been now getting downgraded to variants below monitoring.
“This is really due to changes in circulation and that the variants of interest are just out-competed by the variants of concern. They’re just not taking hold,” she mentioned.
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