Łukasz Gągulski/PAP
The Omicron variant of coronavirus currently accounts for 2.5 percent of all new Covid-19 infections in Poland, the health ministry’s spokesperson has said.
Poland reported its first Omicron case on December 16.
On Tuesday, Waldemar Kraska, a deputy health minister, said that there are 65 new infections by the new variant confirmed in Poland.
Later, Wojciech Andrusiewicz, a health ministry spokesperson, told a press briefing that this translates into 2.5 percent of all new infections compared to 1 percent recorded last week.
“So we have some acceleration here and we can expect that next week we will probably talk about a number bordering on 200 cases of the Omicron,” he said.
Andrusiewicz added that in the EU, Great Britain and the USA, the Omicron variant is responsible for 25-30 percent of new infections.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, which started in Poland on March 4, 2020, a total of 4,145,518 cases of SARS-CoV-2 infection have been detected and 98,034 people have died of Covid-19. During this period, nearly 27 million people have been tested for the disease, according to the health ministry data.