London: A further 86 cases of the Omicron Covid variant have been reported in the UK, taking the total to 246, health authorities confirmed on Sunday.This compares with a total of 160 on Saturday, an increase of more than 50 per cent, Xinhua news agency reported, citing the UK Health Security Agency’s (UKHSA) figures.
Meanwhile, the UK has registered 43,992 new Covid-19 infections, bringing the total number of coronavirus cases in the country to 10,464,389, according to official figures.
The country also reported a further 54 coronavirus-related deaths. The total number of coronavirus-related deaths in the UK now stands at 145,605. These figures only include the deaths of people who died within 28 days of their first positive test.
The latest data came as British Health Secretary Sajid Javid said all international arrivals to the country, including children over the age of 12, will need to take a pre-departure test from 0400 GMT on Tuesday. He added that they must be taken a maximum of 48 hours before departure.
In addition, from Monday, Nigeria will be on the red travel list. It joins several southern African nations which were put on it after the Omicron variant was first detected late last month.
I think it’s too late to make a material difference to the course of the Omicron wave if we’re going to have one, professor Mark Woolhouse, a member of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling (Spi-M), told the BBC, when asked about the new travel rules.
More than 88 per cent of people aged 12 and over in the UK have had their first dose of vaccine and nearly 81 per cent have received both doses, according to the latest figures.
More than 35 per cent have received booster jabs, or the third dose of a coronavirus vaccine.
Omicron variant of Covid-19 was identified in more than a dozen Americans in at least 10 US states as of this weekend, early evidence of its presence across the country, as the federal government fights the pandemic with a consistent vaccination campaign, including broader use of vaccines.
Some of the people in the US who have contracted the new variant had recently travelled to southern Africa, where it was first identified, while at least two states reported community spread of the new variant. States to report Omicron cases span the country from Hawaii to California and New York.
It’s certainly spreading in the US, said Samuel Scarpino, managing director of pathogen surveillance at the Rockefeller Foundation, according to reports by The Wall Street Journal, which also said that US officials expect vaccines to provide at least some level of protection against severe disease from the Omicron.
The Washington Post said Saturday in an analysis article that, though about 1 in 420 Americans has died of Covid-19 and the country is still averaging more than 1,000 deaths per day, death rates are far below the national average in the most-vaccinated, often-urban areas.
While the most-vaccinated states are significantly, incontrovertibly and increasingly better off than the less-vaccinated states, the difference is even starker at the county and city level — and even as many of these highly vaccinated counties also happen to be the most densely populated, said the report.
Meanwhile, much has been written about the yawning gap in outcomes between less-vaccinated and more-vaccinated areas, especially as deaths in less-vaccinated, red states significantly and increasingly outpace more-vaccinated, blue states. Deaths in red counties are more than 50 per cent higher than in blue counties, it added.