"Around 777 million COVID cases and more than seven million deaths have been officially recorded since December 2019, according to the World Health Organisation. Vaccines against COVID have been administered more than 13.6 billion times worldwide, but booster uptake remains low, especially among healthcare workers, according to the WHO. The Omicron variant, which is less severe than the Delta variant, continues to evolve, with the XEC variant emerging in June 2024, according to experts. Long COVID affects about six percent of people infected by coronavirus, posing a substantial burden on health systems, according to the WHO."