The present stage of the coronavirus pandemic is ‘very dangerous’: WHO DG

Despite the world community’s accomplishments in combating the new coronavirus pandemic, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned on Tuesday that it is now in a very dangerous stage.

“While we are making progress in managing the epidemic, it is still at a very dangerous phase,” WHO Director-General Margaret Chan said during a meeting of the ACT Accelerator Facilitation Council.

“The only way out,” he added, “is to help nations in the equal distribution of PPE [personal protective equipment], testing, treatments, and immunizations.”

States with sufficient tools to combat the new coronavirus, according to Ghebreyesus, have already begun to relax pandemic-related restrictions. “Countries without sufficient supplies, on the other hand, are seeing waves of hospitalizations and deaths,” he warned.

On Tuesday, while addressing the United Nations Economic and Social Council’s (ECOSOC) High-Level Political Forum, the WHO Director-General highlighted the matter again. Ghebreyesus mentioned a “steep pandemic” across African, Asian, and American countries in his speech.

“In truth, these cases and fatalities might have been prevented,” he added, urging the international community to “use all of the instruments at our disposal to prevent transmission.” The epidemic proved, according to Ghebreyesus, that “relying on a few businesses to deliver global public goods is limited and dangerous.”

“We must learn from COVID-19,” he added, urging the international community to “be ready for the next one.”

Chinese officials notified the World Health Organization (WHO) in late December 2019 about an epidemic of previously unknown pneumonia in Wuhan, central China. Since then, instances of the new coronavirus, dubbed COVID-19 by the World Health Organization, have been recorded worldwide, including in Russia. The WHO classified the coronavirus outbreak as a pandemic on March 11, 2020.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, 183,934,913 cases have been documented globally, with 3,985,022 deaths. In the last 24 hours, the number of cases has grown by 326,231, while the number of deaths has increased by 6,347.

The WHO, the European Union, France, and philanthropists Bill and Melinda Gates formally inaugurated the Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator, or ACT-Accelerator, on April 24.

The new initiative is “a unique partnership of many of the world’s international health organizations who have come together to share, and build on, individual expertise to create a powerful global solution that will ensure equity in access to tests, vaccines, and treatments across the world with one goal: to reduce the burden of the COVID-19,” according to the WHO.

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