GENEVA, Switzerland — The number of newly
reported COVID-19 cases has dropped dramatically, the
World Health Organization (WHO) said Wednesday, urging the world to seize the opportunity to end the
pandemic.
اضافة اعلان
Newly reported cases of the disease, which has
killed millions since being identified in late 2019, last week fell to the
lowest level since March 2020, said WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
“We have never been in a better position to end the
pandemic,” he told reporters. “We are not there yet, but the end is in sight.”
But the world needed to step up to “seize this
opportunity”, he added.
“If we don’t take this opportunity now, we run the
risk of more variants, more deaths, more disruption, and more uncertainty.”
According to the WHO’s latest epidemiological report
on COVID-19, the number of reported cases fell 12 percent to 4.2 million during
the week ending September 4, compared to a week earlier.
‘Underestimate’
But the agency has warned
that the dropping number of reported cases is deceptive, since many countries
have cut back on testing and may not be detecting the less serious cases.
“The number of cases that are being reported to WHO
we know are an underestimate,” Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO technical lead on
COVID, told reporters.
“We feel that far more cases are actually
circulating than are being reported to us,” she said, cautioning that the virus
“is circulating at a very intense level around the world at the present time”.
Since the start of the pandemic, the WHO has tallied
more than 600 million cases, and some 6.4 million deaths, although both those
numbers are also believed to be serious undercounts.
A WHO study published in May based on excess
mortality seen in various countries during the pandemic estimated that up to 17
million people may have died from COVID in 2020 and 2021.
Van Kerkhove noted that going forward there will
likely be “future waves of infection, potentially at different time points
throughout the world, caused by different sub-variants of Omicron or even
different variants of concern.”
But, she added, “those future waves of infection do
not need to translate into future waves of death.”
‘Seize this opportunity’
In a bid to help countries
to do what is needed to rein in the virus, the WHO on Wednesday published six
policy briefs.
Among the recommendations, the WHO is urging
countries to invest in vaccinating 100 percent of the most at-risk groups, including
health workers and the elderly, and to keep up testing and sequencing for the
virus.
“These policy briefs are an urgent call for
governments to take a hard look at their policies, and strengthen them for
COVID-19 and future pathogens with pandemic potential,” Tedros said.
“We can end this pandemic together, but only if all
countries, manufacturers, communities and individuals step up and seize this
opportunity.”
WHO emergencies director Michael Ryan agreed.
“Even as the pandemic wanes, and as the number of
cases may drop, we are going to have to maintain high levels of vigilance,” he
told reporters.
“We still have a highly mutable, evolving virus that
has shown us time and time again over two and a half years how it can adapt,
how it can change.”
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