The World Health Organization (WHO) today expressed the hope that the covid-19 pandemic will end “in less than two years”, but warned that a vaccine, a “vital tool”, may not exist as quickly as desirable.
The idea was expressed by the Director-General of WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, in a press conference call, from the organization’s headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland.
“The vaccine will be a vital tool, we hope we have one as soon as possible, but there is no guarantee that it will happen,” he said, adding that, for now, the fight against the spread of the coronavirus that causes covid-19 has to be done with other tools, such as physical distance, hand hygiene and the use of masks, and with “adjustments to daily life”.
For Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, if in a globalized world, where people are closer to each other, the “virus has a better chance of spreading”, it is also there that there are “better technologies to control it”.
“Our hope is to end this pandemic in less than two years,” he said, pointing to vaccines as “new tools” to achieve this end.
The executive director of the WHO Health Emergency Program, Mike Ryan, further recalled, drawing on history, that pandemic respiratory viruses become seasonal over time.
“Hopefully there will be vaccines to control the pandemic,” he added.
The covid-19 pandemic has already claimed at least 793,847 deaths and infected more than 22.7 million people in 196 countries and territories, according to a report by the French news agency AFP.
In Portugal, 1,792 people died from 55,211 confirmed to be infected, according to the most recent bulletin from the Directorate-General for Health.
Covid-19 is a respiratory disease caused by a new coronavirus (type of virus) detected in late December in Wuhan, a city in central China, which has spread rapidly around the world.
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