The World Health Organization’s director for Europe expressed worries about the higher level of contagiousness of the Indian and British variants of the novel coronavirus on Friday.
“We know for example that the B.1617 (Indian variant) is more transmissible than the B.117 (British variant), which already was more transmissible than the previous strain,” WHO Europe director Hans Kluge told AFP in an interview.
The Indian variant of coronavirus B.1.617 has been detected in 10 countries of the Americas, mainly associated with international travel, the Pan American Health Organization’s incident manager Sylvain Aldighieri said on Wednesday.
The cases have been detected in North, Central and South America, as well as the Caribbean, though no community transmission has been associated with this variant, he said in a briefing from Washington.