It is possible to end the acute phase of the epidemic covid-19 this year, said today the head of the World Health Organization Tentros Antanom Gebregesus, despite the fact that the disease causes one death every 12 seconds worldwide.
"We can end the acute phase of the pandemic this year - we can end it. covid-19 "as a global emergency," Tentros said today.
However, he warned that "it would be dangerous to estimate that the highly transmissible Omicron is the last variant to appear and that the world is in the last phase of the pandemic", because the conditions are ideal worldwide for the emergence of new variants.
The possibility of a variant strain "more contagious and more deadly" is "very real", said the secretary general of the WHO.
To end the acute phase of the pandemic, countries must not stand idly by and must, among other things, address vaccination inequality, monitor the virus and its variants, and take appropriate restrictive measures, he explained. Tentros on the occasion of the start of the meeting of the Executive Board of the World Health Organization that takes place this week in Geneva.
The head of the WHO has been urging the Member States for weeks to speed up the distribution of vaccines to poor countries in order to be able to vaccinate 70% of the population of all countries by the middle of the year.
In Africa, 85% of the population has not yet received a single dose of the vaccine covid-19, he underlined. Half of the 194 WHO member countries have already lost the target of vaccinating 40% of their population by the end of 2021.
One death every 12 seconds
On average last week one death was recorded from covid-19 12 new cases were reported every 100 seconds and every three seconds, Tentros noted.
The appearance of the "worrying" strain Omicron in November increased the number of cases worldwide, with more than 80 million infections reported since then.
"So far the outbreak has not been followed by an outbreak of deaths, although they are on the rise in all parts of the world, especially in Africa, which has the least access to vaccines," Tentros said.
"It is true that in the foreseeable future we will live with her covid-19 (…) But learning to live with covid does not mean that we will give it free. "This does not mean that we have to accept that almost 50.000 people die every week from a disease that we can prevent and cure."
The pandemic has also disrupted countries' health systems and affected the progress made in recent years in treating other diseases.
The Center also highlighted the "triple billion" targets for the WHO - ie the organization's goal of achieving an additional one billion people from 2019 to 2023 to benefit from comprehensive health coverage, an extra billion people to be better protected from emergencies and an extra billion people in better health - will be delayed.
For this reason, the Center proposed to extend this program by two years until 2025 in order to increase investment from now on in order to achieve the goals.
Source: RES-EAP