WEB DESK
The World Health Organisation (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has said that ‘as enter the third year of the Covid-19 pandemic, I’m confident that this will be the year we end it – but only if we do it together’
Who chief said he was optimistic that the Covid-19 pandemic will end in 2022 only if inequity ends. In a statement he said “as enter the third year of the Covid-19 pandemic, I’m confident that this will be the year we end it – but only if we do it together”.
He added, “while no country is out of the woods from the pandemic, we have many new tools to prevent and treat Covid-19. The longer inequity continues, the higher the risks of this virus evolving in ways we can’t prevent or predict. If we end inequity, we end the pandemic”.
The WHO chief said millions of people have missed out on routine vaccination, services for family planning, treatment for communicable and non-communicable diseases.
He further emphasized to prepare the world for future epidemics and pandemics, “We established the new WHO BioHub System for countries to share novel biological materials,” the WHO head added.
He reiterated that “we need all countries to work together to reach the global target of vaccinating 70% of people in all countries by the middle of 2022.”
The world has recently witnessed a new variant of Covid-19, which has been detected in South Africa, as ‘Omicron’. The WHO has classified Omicron as a ‘variant of concern’.
Even if enough people build natural immunity to Covid-19 by catching the highly contagious Omicron variant, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci said it is too soon to say if this will spell an end to the pandemic.
However, Dr. Fauci, President Biden’s top medical adviser for Covid, was asked at the online World Economic Forum if this may be the year that the virus becomes endemic, meaning it is still circulating but does not disrupt society.
While Omicron seems to cause less severe disease than other variants, Dr. Fauci said the sheer volume of cases could have a meaningful effect on collective immunity, but added, “it is an open question as to whether or not Omicron is going to be the live virus vaccination that everyone is hoping for, because you have such a great deal of variability with new variants emerging.”
“I would hope that that’s the case,” he said, “but that would only be the case if we don’t get another variant that eludes the immune response.”
Dr. Fauci said the evolution of the pandemic is still an open question. “The answer is: We do not know,” he said.
While cases seem to be leveling off in New York and other parts of the Northeast, they remain extremely high across the United States, averaging nearly 802,000 per day, an increase of 98 percent over the past two weeks. An average of nearly 156,000 people with the virus are hospitalized nationwide, a record. Deaths now exceed 1,900 per day, up 57 percent over two weeks.
Dr. Fauci also said that the world is still in the first of what he considered to be the five phases of the pandemic. The first is the “truly pandemic” phase, “where the whole world is really very negatively impacted,” followed by deceleration, control, elimination and eradication. “That’s not going to happen with this virus,” he said.
However, once countries reach the “control” phase, when the virus becomes a “non-disruptive presence,” then the virus will be considered endemic, he said. The rhinovirus and some upper respiratory infections are examples of endemic diseases.