COVID-19 PANDEMIC- A “PLAGUE”: Day 127: WHO – Coronavirus infections growing exponentially, deaths near 50,000
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GENEVA (AFP) – The World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Wednesday (April 1) it was deeply concerned about the near-exponential escalation of the new coronavirus pandemic, with the number of deaths doubling in a week.
WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus urged citizens around the globe to stand together to fight Covid-19, as he braced for the millionth confirmed case.
“As we enter the fourth month since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, I am deeply concerned about the rapid escalation and global spread of infection,” he told a virtual news conference.
“Over the past five weeks, we have witnessed a near exponential growth in the number of new cases, reaching almost every country.
“The number of deaths has more than doubled in the past week. In the next few days we will reach one million confirmed cases and 50,000 deaths.”
Since emerging in China in December, Covid-19 has spread across the globe, claiming more than 43,000 lives, and infecting more than 860,000 people, according to an AFP tally of officially confirmed cases.
The coronavirus pandemic has killed more than 30,000 people in Europe alone. Italy and Spain account for three in every four deaths on the continent.
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However, the virus is expected to gain a greater foothold in parts of the world that have not, so far, seen such large numbers of cases and deaths.
“While relatively lower numbers of confirmed cases have been reported from Africa, and from Central and South America, we realise that Covid-19 could have serious social, economic and political consequences for these regions,” Tedros warned.
“It is critical that we ensure these countries are well equipped to detect, test, isolate and treat Covid-19 cases, and identify contacts.”
He urged governments to implement social welfare measures to ensure that vulnerable people have access to food during the crisis – and called for debt relief for poorer states.
“Many developing countries will struggle to implement social welfare programs of this nature. For those countries, debt relief is essential to enable them to take care of their people and avoid economic collapse,” said Tedros.
He said there were many “unknowns” about how Covid-19 will behave, as it is the “first-ever coronavirus pandemic in the world”.
A safe vaccine is thought to be 12 to 18 months away, while WHO emergencies director Michael Ryan stressed: “There is no therapy that has been proven to be effective in the treatment of Covid-19.”
As regards the use of face masks, the WHO recommends that those people who are infected and health workers who care for them should use medical masks.
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WHO – Coronavirus worst global crisis since WWII, says UN chief
WASHINGTON—The global death toll from the coronavirus pandemic continued to worsen on Wednesday despite unprecedented lockdowns, as the head of the United Nations sounded the alarm on what he said was humanity’s worst crisis since World War II.The warning came as Donald Trump told Americans to brace for a “very painful” few weeks after the United States registered its deadliest 24 hours of the crisis.
The number of deaths in the United States on Wednesday topped 4,000, twice the 2,010 recorded late Saturday, Johns Hopkins data showed.
Members of Trump’s coronavirus task force said the country should be ready for between 100,000 and 240,000 deaths in the coming months.
‘A plague’
Around half of the planet’s population is under some form of lockdown as governments struggle to halt the spread of a disease that has now infected more than 840,000 people. Well over 40,000 are known to have died, half of them in Italy and Spain, but the death toll continues to rise with new records being logged daily in the United States.
“This is going to be a very painful—a very, very painful—two weeks,” the president said at the White House as he described the pandemic as “a plague.” “I want every American to be prepared for the hard days that lie ahead.”
The extraordinary economic and political upheaval spurred by the virus presents a real danger to the relative peace the world has seen over the last few decades, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said on Tuesday.
The “disease … represents a threat to everybody in the world and … an economic impact that will bring a recession that probably has no parallel in the recent past,” he said.
“The combination of the two facts and the risk that it contributes to enhanced instability, enhanced unrest, and enhanced conflict are things that make us believe that this is the most challenging crisis we have faced since the Second World War,” he said at the launch of a report on the socioeconomic impacts of COVID-19.
Human crisis
Guterres called for a much stronger and more effective global response to the coronavirus pandemic and to the social and economic devastation that COVID-19 is causing.
“We are facing a global health crisis unlike any in the 75-year history of the United Nations—one that is killing people, spreading human suffering, and upending people’s lives,” the report said. “But this is much more than a health crisis. It is a human crisis. The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is attacking societies at their core.”
The secretary general told reporters: “The magnitude of the response must match the scale of the crisis—large-scale, coordinated and comprehensive, with country and international responses being guided by the World Health Organization.”
He stressed that “we are still very far from where we need to be to effectively fight the COVID-19 worldwide and to be able to tackle the negative impacts on the global economy and the global societies.”
First, he said, many countries are not respecting WHO guidelines, with each tending to go its own way in dealing with the pandemic.
Secondly, he said, while $5 trillion has been mobilized, most of that money was by the developed world—including $2 trillion in the United States—to support their own economies from the consequences of the pandemic. / Agence France-Presse, Associated Press / 05:34 AM April 02, 2020
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