Countries around the world struggled to come to terms with a bleak new turn in the nearly 2-year-old pandemic, with the World Health Organization warning Monday that omicron, a highly mutated variant of the coronavirus, poses a “very high” global risk of new outbreaks.

The variant’s emergence “underlines just how perilous and precarious our situation is,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Monday.

“We shouldn’t need another wake-up call,” said Tedros. “We should all be wide awake to the threat of this virus.”