Omicron Is Back With A Surge In Cases In Some Parts Of The World: Here's All You Need To Know

After China, South Korea is now facing its worst Covid-19 outbreak as the country hit another milestone, recording over 4,00,000 infection cases on Wednesday.

According to the state media, South Korea reported 4,00,741 new daily Covid-19 cases, the highest since the country reported its first Covid-19 case in January last year.

Most of these cases were said to be locally transmitted.

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South Korea suffering

With fresh cases, South Korea overall caseload has now surged to 7,629,275, the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA) was quoted as saying on Wednesday.

On Tuesday, South Korea had its deadliest day of the pandemic with 293 deaths reported in 24 hours, news agency Associated Press reported.

Meanwhile, China has reportedly decided to ban most of its citizens from leaving the COVID-hit northeastern province and mobilised military reservists amid the quick-spreading "stealth omicron" variant that fuels the nation's biggest outbreak since the start of the global pandemic in 2020.

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The Omicron variant of Covid-19 is still spreading at a very intense level across the globe, said epidemiologist Maria Van Kherkhove via a Twitter thread on Wednesday.

Maria Van Kherkhove is the Covid-19 technical lead at the World Health Organisation. In her thread, she added that the world was registering a rise in cases after a few weeks of decline, even though testing had drastically reduced.

The expert warned that cases will continue to rise in places where restrictive measures are lifted, even if the population has high vaccination coverage. ¡°This shouldn¡¯t be a surprise as vaccines are incredibly effective at reducing severe disease and death, but not infections,¡± Maria Van Kherkhove wrote.

As per recent reports, most of the latest COVID outbreak in China is caused by the variant commonly known as "stealth omicron" or the B.A.2 lineage of the Omicron variant.

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The UK Health and Security Agency (UKHSA) revealed that it is currently studying a sub-lineage of the omicron coronavirus variant¡ªknown as BA.2 and named by some scientists as "stealth omicron".

According to early analysis, the "stealth omicron" variant has been reported to spread quicker than the original Omicron, which itself spreads much quicker than the original virus and other variants. The Omicron COVID variant had been the catalyst for triggering the third pandemic wave that affected the world.

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