Still too soon to say if Omicron more transmissible than Delta: WHO

The UN agency's experts regularly meet drugmakers to discuss the best composition of COVID-19 vaccines as the industry looks at whether shots need to be tweaked to tackle the coronavirus.

The World Health Organization does not yet have enough data on the new Omicron variant of the coronavirus to say if it is more transmissible than the Delta variant, an official said on Wednesday, almost a month after South Africa first raised the alarm about its emergence.

"We do have some data suggesting that rates of hospitalisation are lower," WHO's technical lead on COVID-19, Maria van Kerkhove, said in a briefing with media.

But she cautioned against drawing conclusions from the early data because "we have not seen this variant circulate long enough in populations around the world, certainly in vulnerable populations".

She