The World Health Organization’s (WHO) Secretary-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on Monday warned not to assume that the COVID-19 pandemic is reaching its end game anytime soon as the world reported 100 coronavirus cases every three seconds on an average last week, reported Reuters.
Speaking at the opening of the 150th session of the WHO Executive Board, Ghebreyesus said that there are different scenarios for how the pandemic could play out, and how the acute phase could come to an end but it is dangerous to assume that Omicron will be the last variant.
“It’s dangerous to assume that Omicron will be the last variant and that we are in the end game,” he said.
The WHO head said that more than 80 million infections have been reported since the Omicron variant was first identified nine weeks ago. He warned that the global conditions are ideal for more variants to emerge.
Ghebreyesus said it’s a fact that the world will be living with Covid-19 for the foreseeable future, and that people will need to learn to manage it through a sustained and integrated system for acute respiratory diseases.
“But learning to live with COVID cannot mean that we give this virus a free ride. It cannot mean that we accept almost 50 thousand deaths a week, from a preventable and treatable disease,” he said.
The WHO head added that the world must change the conditions that are driving the pandemic.
He said that it is possible to end COVID-19 as a global health emergency by reaching goals like WHO’s target to vaccinate 70% of the population of each country, especially focusing at people with the highest risk of contracting COVID-19, by the middle of this year and improving testing and sequencing rates to track the virus and its emerging variants more closely.
