Employees store the coffins, some marked with a “risk of infection,” while others have a “crown” on the plaster in the mourning room of the Meissen crematorium in eastern Germany on 13 January 2021, amid the new COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic. cremation.
Jens Schlueter | AFP | Getty Images
The World Health Organization said Friday that coronavirus vaccines are not “silver bullets” and that relying solely on them to fight the pandemic has hurt nations.
Some countries in Europe, Africa and the Americas are experiencing spikes in Covid-19 cases “because collectively we fail to break down transmission chains at the community level or within households,” the WHO Director-General said. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus conference from the agency’s Geneva headquarters.
With global deaths reaching 2 million and new variants of the virus appearing in several countries, world leaders must do everything possible to curb infections “through proven and proven public health measures,” Tedros said. “There’s only one way out of this storm and that is to share the tools we have and commit to using them together.”
The coronavirus has infected more than 93.3 million people worldwide and killed at least 2 million since the pandemic began about a year ago, according to data collected by Johns Hopkins University. The virus continues to accelerate in some regions, and nations report that their oxygen supply to patients with Covid-19 is shrinking “dangerously,” the WHO said.
Some countries, including the United States, have focused heavily on the use of vaccines to combat their outbreaks. While vaccines are a useful tool, they will not end the pandemic alone, Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO health emergency program, told a news conference.
“In 2020 we warned that if we relied entirely on vaccines as the only solution, we could lose the very controlled measures we had at our disposal at the time. And I think to some extent this has become a reality,” he said. Ryan. , adding the colder seasons and recent holidays, may also have played an important role in the spread of the virus.
“A large part of the transmission has occurred because we are reducing physical distancing … We are not breaking the chains of transmission. The virus is exploiting our lack of tactical commitment,” he added. “We’re not doing as well as we could.”
Dr Bruce Aylward, senior adviser to the WHO director-general, echoed Ryan’s comments, saying the vaccines are not “silver bullets”.
“Things can get worse, the numbers can go up,” he said. We have vaccines, yes. But we have a limited supply of vaccines that will be slowly deployed around the world. And vaccines are not perfect. They don’t protect everyone from all situations. “
In the US, the pace of vaccinations is slower than officials had expected. As of Friday, at 6 a.m. ET, more than 31.1 million doses of vaccine had been distributed across the United States, but just over 12.2 million shots had been administered, according to data collected. by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Meanwhile, cases are growing rapidly, with the U.S. recording at least 238,800 new cases of Covid-19 and at least 3,310 virus-related deaths each day, according to a seven-day average calculated by CNBC using data from Johns Hopkins.
On Thursday, President-elect Joe Biden unveiled a comprehensive plan to combat the coronavirus pandemic in the United States. While his administration will invest billions in a vaccine campaign, it will also increase testing, invest in new treatments and work to identify new strains, among other measures.