With seven countries in the South-East Asia Region confirming cases of new Covid-19 variant Omicron, the World Health Organization on Saturday stressed on urgent scale-up of public health and social measures to curtail its further spread. Countries can and must prevent the spread of Omicron with proven health and social measures, Regional Director, WHO South-East Asia Region, Poonam Khetrapal Singh said. "Our focus must continue to be to protect the least protected and those at high risk,” she said in a statement.

The overall threat posed by Omicron largely depends on three key questions -– its transmissibility; how well the vaccines and prior SARS-CoV-2 infection protect against it, and how virulent the variant is as compared to other variants. "From what we know so far, Omicron appears to spread faster than the Delta variant which has been attributed to the surge in cases across the world in the last several months," Singh said. Emerging data from South Africa suggests increased risk of re-infection with Omicron, she said, adding that there is still limited data on the clinical severity associated with Omicron.