Omicron variant live updates: 'Omicron almost certainly not more severe than Delta,' US expert Fauci says

Amid the Omicron scare, Kalyan Dombivali Municipal Corporation chief Vijay Suryavanshi on Monday said 109 out of 295 recent foreign returnees to the township in Thane district were untraceable currently.

The Covid-19 tally of Andaman and Nicobar Islands rose to 7,690 on Tuesday as two more people tested positive for the infection, a health bulletin said.The new cases were detected during contact tracing, it said.

85 passengers from high-risk countries have arrived here & as per SoP, they're instructed to be in-home quarantine. On the 8th day, their RT-PCR test will also be done.

The World Health Organization has come out strongly against the use of convalescent plasma in Covid-19 patients without severe symptoms. It is also against the use of plasma therapy for the severely and critically ill patients, except in clinical trials.According to the UN health body, despite its initial promise, current evidence shows that convalescent plasma does not improve survival chances or reduces the need for mechanical ventilation.

A further 90 cases of the new Omicron Covid variant have been reported in the UK, taking the total to 336, British health authorities have confirmed.These include 64 new cases in England, 23 in Scotland and three in Wales. Northern Ireland has still not seen any confirmed Omicron cases, Xinhua news agency reported.

The World Bank on Monday said its funding had helped deliver 100 million doses of Covid-19 vaccines around the world and it would reach the 150-million mark by the end of the month, if doses arrive as expected. World Bank President David Malpass said the multilateral development bank had contracted for nearly 300 million doses, with some $7.5 billion in vaccine financing operations for 69 countries to be committed by the end of December.

Fiji has reported its first case of the Omicron Covid-19 variant, but the Pacific nation said it appeared to have been contained at the border and not reached the community.Fiji's health department said in an update late Monday that Omicron was detected in two Fijian nationals who arrived from Nigeria via Hong Kong on November 25.It said the pair were both fully vaccinated and had been in a border quarantine facility since their arrival because Nigeria was considered a high-risk "red zone" country."The indications are that we have averted community transmission at this time," Fiji health secretary James Fong said in a statement.

The United States will not send government officials to the 2022 Winter Olympics due to China's human rights "atrocities," the White House said on Monday, after Beijing threatened unspecified "countermeasures" against any diplomatic boycott

Wall Street stocks rallied Monday on hopes that the newest Covid-19 variant will prove less virulent than earlier strains, though market watchers cautioned of more volatility ahead.

Brazil has had 4,385 new cases of the novel coronavirus reported in the past 24 hours, and 108 deaths from Covid-19, the health ministry said on Monday. The South American country has now registered 22,147,476 cases since the pandemic began, while the official death toll has risen to 615,744, according to ministry data, in the world's third worst outbreak outside the United States and India and its second-deadliest.

US health officials said that while the Omicron variant is rapidly spreading throughout the country, early indications suggest it may be less dangerous than Delta, which continues to drive a surge of hospitalisations. President Joe Biden’s chief medial adviser, Dr Anthony Fauci, told CNN on Sunday that scientists need more information before drawing conclusion’s about Omicron’s severity. Reports from South Africa, where it emerged and is becoming the dominant strain, suggest that hospitalisation rates have not increased alarmingly. “Thus far, it does not look like there’s a great degree of severity to it,” Fauci said. “But we have really got to be careful.