World Health Organization (WHO) Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus attends a press conference hosted by the Geneva Association of United Nations Correspondents (ACANU) during the COVID-19 outbreak caused by the novel coronavirus on July 3, 2020 at the WHO headquarters in Geneva.
FABRIC COFFRINI | AFP | Getty Images
LONDON – The head of the World Health Organization said Friday that an alarming trend of increasing Covid cases has meant that global infections are now approaching their highest levels since the start of the pandemic.
“Across the world, the number of cases and deaths continues to increase alarmingly,” WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a briefing on Papua New Guinea and the Western Pacific.
“Globally, the number of new cases per week has nearly doubled in the past two months. This is approaching the highest number of infections we’ve seen during the pandemic so far,” he continued.
“Some countries that previously avoided widespread transmission are now seeing a surge in infections,” said Tedros, citing Papua New Guinea as an example.
Tedros said the United Nations health agency would continue to review the evolution of the coronavirus crisis and “adjust the advice accordingly.”
Under international health regulations, Tedros said the WHO emergency committee met Thursday and expected to receive their advice on Monday.
“Globally, our message to all people in all countries remains the same. We all have a role to play in ending the pandemic,” he said.
According to data from Johns Hopkins University, more than 139 million cases of Covid have been reported worldwide to date, with 2.9 million deaths.
The WHO declared the coronavirus a global pandemic on March 11 last year.
‘Shocking Imbalance’
Tedros has previously said that one of the WHO’s top priorities is to increase the ambition of COVAX, an initiative committed to global equitable access to Covid vaccines, to help all countries end the pandemic.
The COVAX program was expected to deliver nearly 100 million vaccines to humans by the end of March, but so far it has distributed only 38 million doses.
The WHO has said it hopes the initiative will catch up in the coming months, but has condemned what it describes as a “shocking imbalance” in the distribution of vaccines between high and low income countries.
The health agency has also criticized countries for seeking their own vaccine deals for political or commercial reasons outside the COVAX initiative.
At the beginning of the year, WHO’s Tedros had warned that the world was on the brink of “catastrophic moral failure” because of inequality in vaccines.
He said a ‘me-first’ approach to vaccines would put the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people at risk, adding that the approach was ‘self-destructive’ as it would encourage hoarding and likely prolong the health crisis.