"This is not the situation we wanted to found ourselves in one year after the beginning of the pandemic". So has the World Health Organization assessed this Tuesday April 13, 2021 on RFI. Between the vaccination campaign struggling in many areas over the world, and new Covid-19 infections that keep on rising for 7 weeks, WHO regrets an extremely alarming assessment.
"We are at a critical moment", the organization says, like an admission of powerlessness. "With cases increasing by 9% in one week and 5% more deaths on the same period of a global scale, this is not the situation we wanted to found ourselves in one year after the beginning of the pandemic" one of WHO executives told the French-speaking radio. "All the more so vaccines are here now", the same source says.
Same call for WHO's director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus who thinks the weekly bad data are the outcome of some intolerable behaviors. "Despite continuing transmission, restaurants and night clubs are full, markets are open and crowded with few people taking precaution", the organization head reminds. "WHO does not want endless lockdowns", he explains.
First country designed by WHO - without naming it - was Brazil where contamination cases and deaths skyrocket, but president Jair Bolsonaro is not ruling for a nationwide lockdown. In Europe, it is official, one million people have died since the pandemic broke out.
Is Covid only a drop in the ocean of pandemics? Basically, this is what the World Health Organization said this Monday December 28, 2020 explaining one shall expect far worst in the decades to come. “This is a wake-up call” WHO emergencies chief Michael Ryan told during a press brief.
He goes on: “this pandemic has been very severe” also explaining Covid has “spread around the world extremely quickly and it has affected every corner of this planet” but this “is not necessarily the big one”. Even though coronavirus is “very transmissible, and it kills people […] its current case fatality (rate) is reasonably low in comparison to other emerging diseases” he adds.
Emerging diseases that broke out because of many factors such as deforestation, making virus-carrying animal species to get closer to men and spread viruses, or even global warming that led viruses to develop in regions of the world where they were not expected to break out.
As for WHO senior advisor Bruce Aylward, he is not more optimistic saying that “while the world had made huge scientific progress to address the coronavirus crisis, including developing vaccines at record speed, it remained far from prepared to ward off future pandemics”. A not so bright future lies ahead.
