The Director General of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, I affirm that it is possible “to end the acute phase of the coronavirus pandemic this year”, although the current global scenario is still worrying: one person in the world dies from covid-19 every 12 seconds.
“We can end the acute phase of the pandemic this year, we can put an end to covid-19 as a global health emergency”, the WHO’s highest alert level, he declared.
However, the head of the WHO warned that it is “dangerous to suppose that omicron will be the last variant”, because the conditions are “ideal” in the world for other variants to emerge, even more transmissible and virulent ones.
The importance of vaccine distribution
From the WHO they stressed that to end the acute phase of the pandemic, countries are obliged to fight against inequality in vaccination, monitor the virus and its variants and apply adapted restrictions.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus insistently called on the Member States to speed up the distribution of vaccines in poor countries, with the goal of vaccinating 70 percent of the population of all countries in the world by mid-2022.
Half of the 194 WHO member states did not achieve the goal of reaching 40 percent of the population vaccinated by the end of 2021, according to the institution.
those killed by covid
Meanwhile, the coronarivus continues to claim lives: last week, one person died every 12 seconds in the world due to the disease and every three seconds 100 new cases were reported, according to the director of the WHO.
The appearance of the omicron variant in November triggered a new wave of cases. Since then, a total of 80 million new infections have been recorded. But until now, the explosion of cases was not followed by a rise in deaths, although deaths have increased in all regions, especially in Africa, the region with the least access to vaccines,” according to the WHO official.
“It is true that we will live with covid but learning to live with it should not mean that we have to give it a free pass. It should not mean that we have to accept that 50,000 people die every week from a disease that we can prevent and cure,” he said.
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