Half a million died globally since Omicron’s discovery

The World Health Organization lamented that half a million Covid-19 deaths had been recorded since the Omicron variant was discovered, calling the toll "beyond tragic".

The WHO's incident manager Abdi Mahamud said that 130 million cases and 500,000 deaths had been recorded globally since Omicron was declared a variant of concern in late November.

It has since rapidly overtaken Delta as the world's dominant Covid variant because it is more transmissible, though it appears to cause less severe illness.

"In the age of effective vaccines, half a million people dying, it's really something," Mahamud told a live interaction on the WHO's social media channels late on Tuesday.

"While everyone was saying Omicron is milder, (they) missed the point that half a million people have died since this was detected," he said. "It's beyond tragic."

Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO's technical lead on Covid-19, said the sheer number of known Omicron cases was "astounding", while the true number would be much higher.

"It makes the previous peaks look almost flat," she said. "We're still in the middle of this pandemic," she said. "Many countries have not passed their peak of Omicron yet."

Van Kerkhove said she was extremely concerned that the numbers of deaths had increased for several weeks in a row. "This virus continues to be dangerous," she said.

In their weekly Covid-19 epidemiological update issued later Tuesday, the WHO said nearly 68,000 new deaths were reported last week -- up seven percent compared to the previous week.

The global health body yesterday urged rich countries to pay their fair share of the money needed for its plan to conquer Covid-19 by contributing $16 billion as a matter of urgency.

The WHO said the rapid cash injection into its Access to Covid Tools Accelerator could finish off Covid as a global health emergency this year.

The WHO-led ACT-A is aimed at developing, producing, procuring and distributing tools to tackle the pandemic: vaccines, tests, treatments and personal protective equipment.

ACT-A gave birth to the Covax facility, designed to ensure poorer countries could access eventual vaccines, correctly predicting that richer nations would hog doses coming off the production lines.

ACT-A needed $23.4 billion for its programme for the year October 2021-September 2022 but only $800 million has been raised so far.

The scheme therefore wants $16 billion up front from wealthy nations "to close the immediate financing gap", with the rest to be self-funded by middle-income countries.

WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the rapid spread of the Omicron variant made it all the more urgent to ensure tests, treatments and vaccines are distributed equitably.

"If higher-income countries pay their fair share of the ACT-Accelerator costs, the partnership can support low- and middle-income countries to overcome low Covid-19 vaccination levels, weak testing, and medicine shortages," he said in a statement.

The WHO said the vast inequity was not only costing lives and hurting economies, it was also risking the emergence of new, more dangerous variants that could rob current tools of their effectiveness and set even highly-vaccinated populations back by many months.