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Employees store coffins, some marked with a “risk of infection” as others have scribbled “corona” in chalk, in the mourning room of the Meissen crematorium in eastern Germany on January 13, 2021, in the midst of the new COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic. incineration.
Jens Schlueter | AFP | Getty Images
The World Health Organization said on Friday that coronavirus vaccines are not “silver bullets” and that relying solely on them to fight the pandemic has hurt nations.
Some countries in Europe, Africa and the Americas are experiencing peaks of Covid-19 cases “because we collectively fail to break the chains of transmission at the community level or within households,” said the Director-General WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, in a statement. conference at the agency’s headquarters in Geneva.
With deaths worldwide reaching 2 million and new variants of the virus appearing in several countries, world leaders must do all they can to fight infections “with proven public health measures,” Tedros said. “There is only one way out of this storm and that is to share the tools we have and commit to using them together.”
The coronavirus has infected more than 93.3 million people worldwide and killed at least 2 million since the start of the pandemic about a year ago, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. The virus continues to accelerate in some areas, with countries reporting their oxygen supply for patients with Covid-19 is “dangerously low,” the WHO said.
Some countries, including the United States, have focused heavily on using vaccines to control their outbreaks. While vaccines are a useful tool, they alone won’t end the pandemic, Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO’s health emergencies program, told the press conference.
“We warned in 2020 that if we were to rely entirely on vaccines as the only solution, we could lose the very controlled measures we had at the time. And I think to some extent that has come true,” Ryan said. , the addition of colder seasons and recent holidays may also have played a role in the spread of the virus.
“Much of the transmission has happened because we are reducing our physical distance. … We are not breaking the chains of transmission. The virus exploits our lack of tactical engagement,” he added. “We are not doing as well as we could be.”
Dr Bruce Aylward, senior adviser to the WHO Director-General, echoed Ryan’s comments, saying vaccines are not ‘silver bullets’
“Things can get worse, the numbers can go up,” he said. We have vaccines, yes. But we have limited stocks of vaccines that will be rolled out slowly across the world. And vaccines are not perfect. They don’t protect everyone from all situations. “
In the United States, the pace of vaccinations is slower than officials had hoped. As of 6 a.m. ET as of Friday, more than 31.1 million doses of vaccine had been distributed in the United States, but just over 12.2 million vaccines had been administered, according to data compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Meanwhile, cases are increasing rapidly, with the United States registering at least 238,800 new cases of Covid-19 and at least 3,310 virus-related deaths each day, based on a seven-day average calculated by CNBC at the using data from Johns Hopkins.
On Thursday, President-elect Joe Biden unveiled a broad plan to fight the coronavirus pandemic in the United States. Although her administration is investing billions in a vaccination campaign, it will also step up testing, invest in new treatments and work to identify new strains, among other measures.
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