Workers are storing coffins, some marked “risk of infection” and others scribbled with “corona” in chalk, in the crematorium funeral hall in Meissen, East Germany, on January 13, 2021, amid the novel coronavirus COVID 19 pandemic. cremation.
Jens Schlueter | AFP | Getty Images
The World Health Organization said on Friday that coronavirus vaccines are not ‘silver bullets’ and that simply relying on them to fight the pandemic has hurt countries.
Some countries in Europe, Africa and America are seeing peaks in Covid-19 cases “because we collectively fail to break through chains of transmission at the community level or within households,” WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a news report. conference from the agency’s headquarters in Geneva.
With a worldwide mortality of 2 million and new variants of the virus emerging in multiple countries, world leaders must do everything in their power to curb infections “through proven public health measures,” Tedros said. “There is only one way out of this storm and that is by sharing the tools we have and committing to use them together.”
The coronavirus has infected more than 93.3 million people worldwide and killed at least 2 million people since the pandemic started about a year ago, according to data collected by Johns Hopkins University. The virus continues to accelerate in some regions, with countries reporting that their oxygen supply for Covid-19 patients is “dangerously low,” the WHO said.
Some countries, including the US, have focused heavily on the use of vaccines to control their outbreaks. While vaccines are a useful tool, they will not end the pandemic on their own, Mike Ryan, executive director of WHO’s health emergencies program, said at the news conference.
“We warned in 2020 that if we were to rely entirely on vaccines as the only solution, we could lose the highly controlled measures we had at our disposal at the time. And I think to some extent that has come true,” Ryan said. Adding in the colder seasons and the recent holidays may also have played a role in the spread of the virus.
“Much of the transmission has occurred because we are reducing our physical distance … We are not breaking the transmission chains. The virus is exploiting our lack of tactical commitment,” he added. “We’re not doing as well as we could.”
Dr. Bruce Aylward, a senior adviser to the WHO Director-General, echoed Ryan’s comments, saying vaccines are not “silver bullets.”
“It could get worse, the numbers could go up,” he said. We have vaccines, yes. But we have a limited supply of vaccines that will slowly be rolled out around the world. And vaccines aren’t perfect. They don’t protect everyone from every situation. “
In the US, the pace of vaccinations is slower than officials had hoped. At 6 a.m. ET Friday, there were more than 31.1 million doses of vaccine distributed across the US, but just over 12.2 million injections were administered, according to data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Meanwhile, cases are growing rapidly, with the US registering at least 238,800 new Covid-19 cases and at least 3,310 virus-related deaths every day, based on a seven-day average calculated by CNBC using data from Johns Hopkins.
On Thursday, President-elect Joe Biden unveiled a sweeping plan to combat the coronavirus pandemic in the United States. While his government will invest billions in a vaccination campaign, it will scale up testing, invest in new treatments and work on identifying new strains, among other measures.