Employees store coffins, some marked with ‘risk of infection’, while others scratched ‘corona’ in chalk, in the mourning hall of the crematorium in Meissen, East Germany, on 13 January 2021 amid the new coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic. cremation.
Jens Schlueter | AFP | Getty Images
The World Health Organization said Friday that coronavirus vaccines are not a silver bullet and that it only relies on fighting the pandemic, hurting countries.
Some countries in Europe, Africa and the Americas are seeing an increase in Covid-19 cases ‘because together we are failing to break the distribution chains at the community level or within households,’ said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said during a news release. conference of the agency’s headquarters in Geneva.
With global deaths reaching 2 million and new variants of the virus appearing in several countries, world leaders must do everything in their power to fight infections “through proven public health measures,” Tedros said. “There is only one way out of this storm, it is to share the tools we have and commit ourselves to using them together.”
According to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University, the coronavirus worldwide has infected more than 93.3 million people worldwide and killed at least 2 million people since the pandemic began. The virus continues to accelerate in some regions, with countries reporting that their oxygen supply to Covid-19 patients is “dangerously low”, the WHO said.
Some countries, including the US, have focused strongly on the use of vaccines to combat their outbreaks. While vaccines are a useful tool, they will not end the pandemic alone, said Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO’s health emergency program, at the news conference.
“We warned in 2020 that if we relied entirely on vaccines as the only solution, we would lose the very controlled measures we had at our disposal at the time. And I think that has come true to some extent,” he said. said Ryan. , by adding the colder seasons and the recent holidays, may also have played a role in the spread of the virus.
“A large part of the transmission took place because we reduced our physical distance … We do not break the chains of transmission. The virus exploits our lack of tactical commitment,” he added. “We are not doing as well as we could.”
Dr. Bruce Aylward, a senior adviser to the director general of the WHO, confirmed Ryan’s comments, saying that vaccines are not a “silver bullet”.
“Things can get worse, the numbers can go up,” he said. We have vaccinations, yes. But we have a limited amount of vaccines that will be rolled out slowly around the world. And vaccines are not perfect. They do not protect everyone from every situation. ‘
In the US, the rate of vaccinations is going slower than officials had hoped. As of Friday at 6 p.m. ET, more than 31.1 million doses of vaccine have been distributed across the U.S., but just over 12.2 million shots have been administered, according to data compiled by the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention.
Meanwhile, cases are growing rapidly, with the U.S. recording at least 238,800 new Covid-19 cases and at least 3,310 virus-related deaths each day, based on an average of seven days calculated by CNBC using Johns Hopkins data.
Elected President Joe Biden on Thursday unveiled a comprehensive plan to combat the coronavirus pandemic in the United States. While its administration will invest billions in a vaccine campaign, it will also increase testing, invest in new treatments and work to identify new strains, among others.