/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/eluniverso/VYCX5JBLSNALRJ7XOWTXMP4UJE.jpg "Ecuador, the ninth country in America to identify the omicron variant in its territory | International | News")
In South America, it is the fourth country that managed to sequence and report at least one case.
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On Tuesday night, the Minister of Health of Ecuador, Ximena Garzón, reported the first case of COVID-19 with the omicron variant. He is a 48-year-old engineer who left the country in mid-November to carry out research on the African continent., with two colleagues from Agrocalidad.
With this, it became the ninth country in America to report at least one case with this variant that has set off alarms due to an increase in infections.
Ministry of Health confirms presence of omicron variant in Ecuador
In the world there are already 77 countries that have cases with the variant. In America the first country to report a case was Brazil at the end of November, from there it already adds 12 cases in total until last Tuesday.
Another of the countries that have registered cases are:
- Chile
- Argentina
- Trinidad and Tobago
- Puerto Rico
- U.S
- Canada
- Mexico
- Ecuador
For the detection of cases with the variant, genomic sequencing of the sample is necessary, since a symptomatology is not specific for the variants.
WHO warns that omicron variant expands at an accelerated rate
“It is probably already in most countries, even in those that have not yet been detected,” acknowledged at a press conference the director general of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who expressed concern that a large part of society has let your guard down in the face of this evolution of the virus.
Adhanom insisted that “vaccines alone are not going to get any country out of this crisis,” since the transmission of the coronavirus must be dealt with by other means, including the use of masks, avoiding crowded places, good ventilation or hand hygiene. (I)
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