Medical workers transfer a patient to the intensive care unit (ICU) of Sotiria Hospital, amid the coronavirus disease pandemic (COVID-19), in Athens, Greece, on March 1, 2021.
Giorgos Moutafis | Reuters
World Health Organization officials said Wednesday that scientists are trying to understand why Covid-19 cases are suddenly recurring in much of the world after weeks of falling infections.
Last week, 2.6 million new cases were reported worldwide, 7% more than the previous week, the WHO said in its weekly epidemiological update reflecting data received on Sunday morning. This follows six consecutive weeks of new cases declining worldwide.
The reversal could be caused by the emergence of several more contagious variants of the coronavirus, relaxing public measures and so-called pandemic fatigue, in which people get tired of following precautions, the WHO said in its weekly report. . Maria Van Kerkhove, head of the WHO’s Emerging Diseases and Zoonoses Unit, said on Wednesday during a question and answer session at the organisation’s headquarters in Geneva that the World Health Agency is trying to better understand what causes reversal of trends in each region and country.
“I can tell you that what worries us is the introduction of vaccines and vaccination in various countries, we still need people to carry out their measurements at the individual level,” he said, urging people to practice physical distancing and to continue to put masks around others.
“Seeing this week of rising trends, it’s a pretty stern warning to all of us that we need to keep heading,” Van Kerkhove said. “We must continue to adhere to these measures.”
Dr Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO health emergency program, suggested the increase could be because “we may relax a bit before we have the full impact of vaccination.” He added that he understands the temptation to socialize more and return to more normal behavior, but “the problem is every time we did it before the virus exploded.”
Ryan reiterated that the cause of the increase in cases is still unclear, but added that the tried and tested public health measures that have been highlighted throughout the pandemic are still effective.
“When cases decrease we never do everything and when they increase it is never our fault,” he said.
Ryan noted that deaths have not yet risen with the cases, but that could change in the coming weeks. Fortunately, he said, an increase in deaths due to vaccination of the most vulnerable to the disease can be avoided.
While vaccine launches are cause for optimism in some countries, Ryan noted that many nations around the world have not yet received doses. He said 80% of the doses have been administered in just ten countries.
WHO’s observations echo those made recently by federal officials in the United States. Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has been warning for days that the decline in new daily cases in the United States has stopped and increased.
Over the past seven days, the U.S. has reported an average of more than 65,400 new cases daily, according to data collected by Johns Hopkins University. It is well below the maximum of about 250,000 new cases reported daily by the country in early January, but it is still well above the rate of infection seen by the United States during the summer when the virus swept the solar belt.
“At this level of cases, with the spread of variants, we are completely losing ground,” Walensky said Monday. “With these statistics, I’m really concerned that more states are pushing back exactly the public health measures we’ve recommended to protect people from Covid-19.”
“Please listen to me clearly: at this level of cases with extending variants, we are completely losing the hard-won ground,” he said.