US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has said that she was “very concerned” about the risk that new variants of coronavirus could pose to the global economic recovery from the pandemic, reports AFP.

“We are very concerned about the Delta variant and other variants that could emerge and threaten [the] recovery,” she told reporters following a G20 meeting in Venice, Italy. “We are a connected global economy, what happens in any part of the world affects all other countries.”

In their final statement issued late on Saturday, G20 finance ministers warned that the spread of new variants was a “downside risk” to the economic recovery, while also warning of the dangers of differing paces of vaccination campaigns.