Photo credit: Ninian Reid|Flickr
Geneva: India remains hugely concerning, with several states continuing to see a worrying number of cases, hospitalizations and deaths, the WHO stated here today. Its Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told mediapersons that WHO was responding and had shipped thousands of oxygen concentrators, tents for mobile field hospitals, masks and other medical supplies.
“And we thank all the stakeholders who are supporting India,” he said.
The WHO though stated that it was not only India that had emergency needs, and Nepal, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand and Egypt were just some of the countries that were dealing with spikes in cases and hospitalizations.
Besides, some countries in the Americas still have high numbers of cases and as a region, the Americas accounted for 40% of all COVID-19 deaths last week. There were also spikes in some countries in Africa.
“These countries are in heightened response mode and WHO will continue to provide support in all ways possible,” Dr. Ghebreyesus said, adding that COVID-19 had already cost more than 3.3 million lives and “we’re on track for the second year of this pandemic to be far more deadly than the first”.
He said saving lives and livelihoods with a combination of public health measures and vaccination – not one or the other – was the only way out of the pandemic, but vaccine supply remains a key challenge. At present, only 0.3% of vaccine supply was going to low-income countries. Trickle down vaccination is not an effective strategy for fighting a deadly respiratory virus.
Dr. Ghebreyesus though said that this week he had been “pleased to see” leaders and manufacturers working to address some of these issues.
According to him, first, there had been a number of new country announcements about sharing vaccines with COVAX, which is the fastest way to ensure equitable rollout of vaccines. Second, new deals involving tech-transfer and sharing of know-how between international manufacturers to scale up vaccine production had been announced. And third, leaders including the Prime Minister of Spain, Pedro Sánchez, have called for all trade barriers to be lifted as soon as possible.
– global bihari bureau
