The COVID-19 pandemic is “most certainly not over,” the head of the World Health Organization warned Sunday. He told officials gathered in Geneva for the opening of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) annual meeting that despite a decline in reported cases since the peak of the Omicron wave, they cannot afford to relax their efforts to end the pandemic.
“We lower our guard at our peril,” warned Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the UN health agency’s director-general.
“Declining testing and sequencing means we are blinding ourselves to the evolution of the virus,” he said, noting that almost 1 billion people in lower-income countries still haven’t been vaccinated.
In a weekly report on the global situation published on Thursday, the WHO said the number of new COVID-19 cases appears to have stabilized after weeks of decline since late March, while the overall number of weekly deaths dropped.
While there has been progress, with 60 percent of the world’s population vaccinated, “It’s not over anywhere until it’s over everywhere,” Tedros said.
“Reported cases are increasing in almost 70 countries in all regions, and this in a world in which testing rates have plummeted,” he added.
He said reported deaths are rising in Africa, the continent with the lowest vaccination coverage, and only 57 countries – almost all of them wealthy – have vaccinated 70 percent of their people.
While the world’s vaccine supply has improved, there is “insufficient political commitment to roll out vaccines,” he said, adding that there are gaps in operational capacity in some countries while others lack the funds.
“In all, we see vaccine hesitancy driven by misinformation and disinformation,” Tedros said. “The pandemic will not magically disappear, but we can end it.”
Tedros is expected to be appointed for a second five-year term this week at the World Health Assembly, the annual meeting of the WHO’s member countries.
Globally, the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases has surpassed 525 million, with over 6.2 million deaths, the latest data from Johns Hopkins University shows.
With more than 3.8 billion COVID-19 doses administered to date, the world continues to see a stark disparity in vaccination as lower-income countries struggle to inoculate their populations. Meanwhile, higher-income nations now give fourth or even fifth doses.
According to the WHO, only 16 percent of people in low-income countries have received a single vaccine dose – compared to 80 percent in high-income countries. Eighteen countries have less than 10 percent of their population inoculated with COVID-19 vaccines.
Source: CGTN