The Americas are not behaving as if they are worsening the COVID-19 crisis, warns regional health official

BOGOTA (Reuters) – The Americas are not behaving like a region experiencing an increasingly severe outbreak of COVID-19, the director of the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) warned on Wednesday.

This increase in infections is alarming but not surprising given the relaxed restrictions used to curb the transmission of the virus, PAHO Director Carissa Etienne told a weekly news conference, adding that vaccination it will not be enough to stop this wave of contagion.

“Highly transmissible variants are spreading and social distancing measures are not being observed as strictly as before,” Etienne said. “We don’t act like a region in the middle of a worsening outbreak.”

Over the past seven days, more people have become infected with COVID-19 in the region than during most weeks of last year, Etienne noted, while weekly deaths exceed those of any week in 2020.

More than 1.3 million people in the Americas became infected and nearly 36,000 died last week, PAHO said.

“There just aren’t enough vaccines available to protect everyone in the most at-risk countries,” Etienne said. “We have to stop the transmission by any possible means with the tools at hand.”

It will be a few weeks before the normalization of the supply of vaccines, said Etienne, who added that countries should continue to administer the AstraZeneca vaccine, as the adverse effects are very rare.

He said leaders at all levels can play a crucial role in tightening measures at the first signs of growing infection.

“We have observed an obvious 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 significant increases in cases should consider blocking measures, although if the outbreaks are already visible it may be too late, said Ciro Ugarte, PAHO’s director of health emergencies.

“It is clear that these measures need to be taken into account,” Ugarte said, adding that these measures should be localized and of very limited duration.

If COVID-19 is not controlled worldwide, there is the worst case scenario for a new vaccine-resistant variant, said Jarbas Barbosa, deputy director of PAHO.