By Julia Symmes Cobb
BOGOTA (Reuters) – The Americans are not behaving like a region experiencing an increasingly serious outbreak of COVID-19, the director of the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) warned on Wednesday.
This increase in infections is worrying, but not surprising, given relaxed constraints used to limit virus transmission, Carissa Etienne, director of PAHO, said at a weekly news conference.
“Many communicable variants are distributed and social distance measures are not adhered to as strictly as before,” Etienne said. “We are not acting like a region in the midst of a worse outbreak.”
More people have been infected with COVID-19 in the region over the past seven days than during most weeks last year, Etienne noted, while weekly deaths are more than those of any week in 2020.
More than 1.3 million people in the Americas were infected and nearly 36,000 died last week, PAHO said.
“There are simply not enough vaccines available to protect everyone in the countries at greatest risk,” Etienne said. “We must stop the shipment in any way with the tools we have on hand.”
It will take several weeks for the vaccine supply to normalize, Etienne said, adding that countries should continue to administer the AstraZeneca vaccine as adverse effects are very rare.
Leaders at every level can play an important role by tightening the measures as the first sign of increasing infections, she said.
“We have noticed that there is a clear relaxation in the implementation of public health measures,” said Sylvain Aldighieri, COVID-19 incident manager. Regardless of the virus variant, COVID-19 has the ability to overwhelm health systems, he said.
Countries with a significant increase in the number of cases should consider lock-in measures, but if outbreaks are already visible, it may be too late, said the director of PAHO’s health emergency, Ciro Ugarte.
“It is clearly necessary to consider these measures,” Ugarte said, adding that such measures should be localized and of very limited duration.
If COVID-19 is not controlled around the world, there is a worst-case scenario where a new vaccine-resistant variant emerges, said Jarbas Barbosa, PAHO’s deputy director.
(Reporting by Julia Symmes Cobb Edited by Bill Berkrot)