The Director of Health Emergencies of the World Health Organization (WHO), Mike Ryan, stressed that, despite the fact that more than a hundred countries have already started vaccinations, community prevention measures or new waves of COVID-19 must be continued. .
“This is not the time to relax with the measures, if we do, we risk a new wave of cases,” Ryan said after learning that the number of infections worldwide rose by 7% last week after six weeks. of declines.
The Irish expert insisted that the fight against COVID now has three fundamental pillars – individual prevention measures, public health surveillance and vaccinations – and that only if all three work at the same time “can we make fencing a thing of the past?” ”.
“In the absence of any of them, we will return to large-scale social measures,” Ryan warned at the weekly WHO expert meeting with Internet users via social media.
“I understand that we are all tired and fed up, but control is in our hands, we are approaching the light at the end of the tunnel,” the WHO chief of emergency stressed.
Ryan explained that about 115 countries have started vaccinations and given about 265 million doses worldwide, although the distribution is still uneven, and 80 percent of them have been used in only ten countries (including the US, China or the UK). ), which leads the absolute figures for immunizations).
The expert also recalled and celebrated as excellent news in the fight against COVID the beginning of the distribution of vaccines through the solidarity network COVAX, which since last week has already sent about 10 million doses to a dozen countries, including Colombia, Ghana, Coast of Ivory or South Korea.
The head of the WHO’s anti-video technical unit, Maria Van Kerkhove, mentioned in the same virtual meeting the concern generated by the new variants of the coronavirus in the fight against the pandemic (one of them, the British, is already present in more than a hundred countries). .
However, the American stressed that so far it has been shown that the usual preventive measures (avoid crowded places, mask, hand hygiene) also work against these new variants, first encountered in patients in the United Kingdom, South Africa and Brazil.