Despite the rise in Covid-19 cases around the world, there is currently no specific dominant strain of the virus, Covid-19 Technical Lead of the World Health Organization (WHO) Maria Van Kerkhove said on Wednesday.
"We're still dealing with Omicron and many of the sub-lineages. We have three variants of interest that we’re tracking: ХВВ.1.5, ХВВ.1.16 and EG.5. EG.5 is on the rise around the world, and the other two ХВВs are starting to decline. But we don’t have any one variant that is dominant worldwide," Van Kerkhove said at a regular briefing.
She also said that the WHO was seeing an increase in Covid-19 cases worldwide, as well as an increase in the number of hospitalisations and patients in intensive care units, which is "more worrying."
However, there is no signs that the disease has become more severe, Van Kerkhove said.
In December 2022, the WHO said that over 500 subvariants of Omicron existed, adding that the conditions were in place for new strains to emerge.
As of September 27, there have been a total of 770.7 million WHO-confirmed Covid-19 cases globally, including 6.95 million deaths.