PARIS
\nThe number of new COVID-19 cases reported worldwide rose by 80 percent in the last month, the World Health Organization said on Friday, days after designating a new \u201cvariant of interest.\u201d
\nThe WHO declared in May that COVID-19 is no longer a global health emergency, but has warned that the virus will continue to circulate and mutate, causing occasional spikes in infections, hospitalizations and deaths.
\nIn its weekly update, the UN agency said that nations reported nearly 1.5 million new cases from July 10 to August 6, an 80 percent increase compared to the previous 28 days.
\nHowever the number of deaths fell by 57 percent to 2,500.
\nThe WHO warned that the reported number of cases and deaths do not reflect the true numbers, in part because countries carry out far less testing and monitoring than during earlier stages of the pandemic.
\nMany of the new cases came in the Western Pacific region, which saw infections jump by 137 percent, the WHO said.
\nSeveral countries in the Northern Hemisphere, including the United States, United Kingdom, France and Japan have seen a summer uptick in cases in recent weeks.
\nExperts have suggested that summer gatherings and travel, declining immunity and a new subvariant may have all played a role in the increase.
\nOn Wednesday, the WHO designated the omicron subvariant EG.5 as a \u201cvariant of interest\u201d following a steady rise in its prevalence.
\nMore than 17 percent of all reported cases were EG.5 in mid-July, up from 7.6 percent a month before, according to the WHO.
\nEG.5, which has been unofficially nicknamed \u201cEris\u201d online, is considered to be a descendant of the XBB lineage of the virus.
\nIt seems to be more transmissible than other circulating variants, likely due to a mutation in its spike protein, and the WHO said it has shown an ability to evade immunity.
\nBut there is no sign that EG.5 causes more severe COVID-19 symptoms and it poses a \u201clow\u201d risk to global public health, the WHO said, comparing its threat to other recent omicron subvariants.
\nNonetheless, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned that \u201cthe risk remains of a more dangerous variant emerging that could cause a sudden increase in cases and deaths.\u201d
\nFrance\u2019s Health Minister Aurelien Rousseau called for vigilance, while emphasizing that COVID-19 numbers remain at low levels.
\n\u201cWe will have to live with the resurgence of this virus for several seasons to come,\u201d he said in a statement.
\nAntoine Flahault, director of the Institute of Global Health at the University of Geneva, said that the true COVID-19 situation remained unclear \u201cjust about everywhere in the world.\u201d
\n\u201cHealth authorities urgently need to reinstate a reliable COVID-19 health monitoring system,\u201d he said, calling for wastewater to be analyzed to detect virus trends.
\nWhile the impact of COVID-19 has been greatly diminished due to high levels immunity from either vaccination or prior infection, the virus still poses a threat \u2014 including long COVID-19, for which symptoms can last for months or years.
\nThe WHO has urged countries to ramp up vaccination efforts.
\nPharmaceutical firms Pfizer\/BioNTech, Moderna and Novavax are all working on updating their COVID-19 vaccines to target XBB subvariants.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
PARIS The number of new COVID-19 cases reported worldwide rose by 80 percent in the last month, the World Health Organization said on Friday, days after designating a new \u201cvariant of interest.\u201d The WHO declared in May that COVID-19 is no longer a global health emergency, but has warned that the virus will continue to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":348777,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-348743","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world"},"yoast_head":"\n