The
World Health Organization said Wednesday it is too early to lift the
highest-level alert for the Covid crisis, with the pandemic remaining a global
health emergency despite recent progress.
اضافة اعلان
The WHO's emergency committee on Covid-19 met last week and concluded that
the pandemic still constitutes a public health emergency of international
concern (PHEIC), a status it declared back in January 2020.
WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters Wednesday that he agreed
with the committee's advice.
"The committee emphasised the need to strengthen surveillance and
expand access to tests, treatments and vaccines for those most at risk,"
he said, speaking from the UN health agency's headquarters in Geneva.
The WHO first declared the Covid-19 outbreak a PHEIC on January 30, 2020,
when, outside of China, fewer than 100 cases and no deaths had been reported.
Though it is the internationally-agreed mechanism for triggering an
international response to such outbreaks, it was only in March, when Tedros
described the worsening situation as a pandemic, that many countries woke up to
the danger.
Since the start of the Covid pandemic, more than 622 million confirmed Covid
cases have been reported to WHO and more than 6.5 million deaths, although
those numbers are believed to be significant underestimates.
According to WHO's global dashboard of the situation, 263,000 new cases were
reported in the previous 24 hours, while 856 new Covid deaths had been reported
in the past week.
Tedros acknowledged Wednesday that "the global situation has obviously
improved since the pandemic began," but he warned that "the virus
continues to change and there remain many risks and uncertainties."
"The pandemic has surprised us before and very well could again,"
he warned.
- 'Surveillance has
declined -
Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO's Covid-19 technical lead, agreed, warning that
there were still "millions of cases being reported each week, but our
surveillance has declined."
This is making it difficult to get a full overview of the situation and
especially of how the virus is mutating.
She stressed that "the more this virus circulates, the more
opportunities it has to change."
The Omicron variant accounts for basically all virus samples that are
sequenced, with more than 300 sublineages of that variant recorded.
"All of the subvariants of Omicron are showing increased
transmissibility and properties of immune escape," Van Kerkove said, adding
that one new combination of two different subvariants was showing
"significant immune evasion."
"This is a concern for us because we need to ensure that the vaccines
that are in use worldwide remain effective at preventing severe disease and
death," she said.
In light of the broad spread of new Omicron subvariants, Van Kerkhove
stressed that "countries need to be in a position to conduct surveillance
to deal with increases in cases and perhaps deal with increases in
hospitalisations."
"We have to remain vigilant."
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