Coronavirus: UAE reports 51 Covid-19 cases, 69 recoveries, no deaths

The UAE Ministry of Health and Prevention on Saturday reported 51 cases of the Covid-19 coronavirus, along with 69 recoveries and no deaths.

Over 101.8 million PCR tests have been conducted in the country so far.

The new cases were detected through 185,406 additional tests.

The total number of cases in UAE as on December 4 are 742,278, while total recoveries stand at 737,255. The death toll now stands at 2,148.

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The Omicron variant has been detected in 38 countries but no deaths have yet been reported, the WHO said on Friday, as authorities worldwide rushed to stem the heavily mutated Covid-19 strain’s spread amid warnings that it could damage the global economic recovery.

The United States and Australia became the latest countries to confirm locally transmitted cases of the variant, as Omicron infections pushed South Africa’s total cases past three million.

The World Health Organisation has warned it could take weeks to determine how infectious the variant is, whether it causes more severe illness and how effective treatments and vaccines are against it.

“We’re going to get the answers that everybody out there needs,” WHO emergencies director Michael Ryan said.

Meanwhile, a recent study has shown that the Omicron variant of the virus that causes Covid-19 likely acquired at least one of its mutations by picking up a snippet of genetic material from another virus - possibly one that causes the common cold - present in the same infected cells.

This genetic sequence does not appear in any earlier versions of the coronavirus, called SARS-CoV-2, but is ubiquitous in many other viruses including those that cause the common cold, and also in the human genome, researchers said.

By inserting this particular snippet into itself, Omicron might be making itself look "more human," which would help it evade attack by the human immune system, said Venky Soundararajan of Cambridge, Massachusetts-based data analytics firm nference, who led the study posted on Thursday on the website OSF Preprints.

This could mean the virus transmits more easily, while only causing mild or asymptomatic disease. Scientists do not yet know whether Omicron is more infectious than other variants, whether it causes more severe disease or whether it will overtake Delta as the most prevalent variant. It may take several weeks to get answers to these questions.

• Dubai
• Abu Dhabi