GENEVA.- The director-general of the World Health Organization warned on Monday that conditions remain ideal for more coronavirus variants and that it is dangerous to assume that omicron is the last or that “we are at the end of the game”.
But Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus he said the acute phase of the pandemic could still end this year if some key targets are met.
Tedros He presented a series of achievements and concerns in global health on topics such as reducing tobacco consumption, combating resistance to antimicrobial treatments and the risks of climate change to human health. But he said “ending the acute phase of the pandemic must remain our collective priority.”
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“There are different scenarios for how it could play out the pandemic and how the acute phase might end. But it is dangerous to assume that omicron will be the last variant or that we are in the endgame,” he said. Tedros at the start of a WHO executive board meeting this week. “On the contrary, globally, the conditions are ideal for more variants to emerge.”
But he insisted that “we can end the COVID-19 as a global health emergency, and we can do it this year”, by reaching goals such as the WHO’s to vaccinate 70% of the population of each country by the middle of this year, with a focus on people who are most at risk from COVID-19, and improve testing and sequencing rates to track the virus and its emerging variants more closely.
According to studies, you are less likely to Omicron causes serious illness than the previous delta variant.
Omicron spreads even more easily than other coronavirus strains and has already become dominant in many countries. It also more easily infects those who have been vaccinated or previously infected with earlier versions of the virus. virus.
“It is true that we will live with covid for the foreseeable future and that we will need to learn how to manage it through a sustained and integrated system for acute respiratory diseases” to help prepare for future pandemics, Tedros said.
But learning to live with covid can’t mean we give this guy a free ride virus. It cannot mean that we accept nearly 50,000 deaths a week from a preventable and treatable disease.”
In harsh terms, Tedros He also called for strengthening the WHO and increasing funding to help prevent health crises.
“Let me make it clear: If the current funding model continues, The OMS it is setting itself up to fail,” he said. “The paradigm shift in global health that is now needed must be accompanied by a paradigm shift in financing the world health organization.”
The head of the WHO European region, Dr. Hans Kluge, said separately in a statement that omicron “offers plausible hope for stabilization and normalization,” but warned: “Our work is not done.” He was referring to signs that the new variant has been shown to bring with it less severe disease, albeit more transmissible.
He lamented “huge disparities” in access to vaccines and echoed the concerns of other officials at the who that areas where people are less immune could allow the virus to adapt and possibly lead to new variants.
Kluge offered a more hopeful note, even if he did say that “it’s pretty much a given that new variants of COVID-19“.
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He said that practices such as strong surveillance of new variants, high uptake of vaccines, regular ventilation of indoor areas, equitable and affordable access to antiviral drugs, targeted testing, use of masks and physical distancing, “when a new variant appears, I think a new wave could no longer require a return to lockdowns of the entire population from the era of the pandemic or similar measures,” he said.
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