Omicron Covid variant ‘almost certainly’ not more severe than Delta, says top US scientist Anthony Fauci . READ MORE :
V/D/C NEWS : Allaying fears regarding the new Omicron variant of Coronavirus that has the world on tenterhooks, US scientist Anthony Fauci has said that early indicators suggest Omicron is not worse than the previous strains of the virus, and possibly milder. However, he admitted that it will still take weeks before the severity of the new Covid-19 variant Omicron can be judged.
News agency AFP quoted US President Joe Biden’s chief medical advisor as saying that the new variant is “clearly highly transmissible” — even more than the Delta variant, which is the current dominant global strain.
The World Health Organisation has categorised the new Coronavirus variant as the ‘Variant of Concern’ because experts have claimed that Omicron might possess some specific characteristics owing to the genetic modification in the virus. Most of the people who have tested Omicron positive have either recently arrived from African countries or had come in contact with such people. Amid the increasing number of cases of the new Covid variant, pictures of chaos at Delhi airport had also gone viral on Monday, following which Aviation Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia directed the airport authorities to implement better crowd management strategies. Scindia had called a meeting with officials of the Airports Authority of India, Bureau of Immigration and GMR group-led Delhi International Airport Limited (DIAL), reported PTI. The Delhi Airport had later tweeted that it had updated the testing capacity at international arrival with deployment of 120 Rapid PCR machines, taking hourly capacity to 500-600 per hour with a TAT of less then 60 minutes.
The Centre had issued a revised guideline for international travellers which came into effect on December 1. The guidelines are to be followed across airports in India. All travellers have to go through RT-PCR tests on arrival, and their test results have to be negative in order to leave the airport .
