Thailand Ministry of Health reports 15,882 new COVID-19 cases and an additional 24 deaths since yesterday. The ministry also announced an additional 9,482 recovered patients.
The World Health organization continues to track new variants appearing worldwide. Dr. Andrew Freedman from Cardiff University Medical School said that viruses “tend to become milder” as they evolve. However, he continued to say “isn’t always the case.”
“It may well be with future variants that they are even more contagious. They may be milder, but we can’t say that with certainty,” he added. “Until the whole world is vaccinated, not just rich Western countries, I think we are going to remain in danger of new variants coming along and some of those could be more virulent than omicron.”
Thailand is on track to be one of the countries that have 70% of the population vaccinated according to WHO data. This is a great effort by the country. This is not the case for other countries. Some countries are nowhere near the 70% vaccination requirements.
The WHO has released the data for fully vaccinated 70% of their population by mid-2022. The green tag represents those who are already above 70%. Yellow shows the countries on track to be at 70%. The red tag is for countries that are nowhere near 70%.
Among those on the green zones are Canada, China, Japan, Australia, France, Germany, and Switzerland. There are about 40% of countries that are in the yellow zone. This includes the UK, Thailand, India, Russia, Brazil, Columbia, and Mexico. About 50% of the countries are still in the red zone. These include Myanmar, Kazakhstan, Poland, Turkey, Ukraine, Romania, and most of South Africa. The only countries that are tagged yellow in South Africa are Tunisia, Mauritania, Republic of Congo, Rwanda and Djibouti. The rest are on red zones.