in the past week alone. that almost dwarves the numbers i of covid cases previously seen. i the impact on older age groups isn't fully understood. - there are a lot of unknowns, a lot of delta circulating - still, so it's not a changej in the pandemicjust yet. we still need to wait a few months. hopefully we will see that change in due course, - but it's not happening right now. we need to keep a very close eye on how it continues to evolve, . how omicron will continue to evolve, but also other. variants that may appear. we don't know what they'll be in terms of characteristics. . we hope we will be lucky and, if it does continue to mutate, i that it will mutate into less severe variants, but that's not a given. i let's talk about kazakhstan. its government has declared a state