The Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, is attending a press conference organized by the Geneva Association of United Nations Correspondents (ACANU) amid the COVID-19 outbreak caused by the new coronavirus on 3 July 2020 at WHO in Geneva.
FABRICE COFFRINI | AFP | Getty Images
LONDON – The head of the World Health Organization said on Friday that an alarming trend of increasing Covid cases has led to global infections now approaching the highest level since the beginning of the pandemic.
“Across the world, cases and deaths continue to rise at alarming rates,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a briefing focusing on Papua New Guinea and the Western Pacific region.
“Globally, the number of new cases per week has almost doubled in the last two months. This is close to the highest infection rate we have seen so far during the pandemic,” he continued.
“Some countries that previously avoided widespread transmission are now experiencing sharp increases in infections,” Tedros said, citing Papua New Guinea as an example.
Tedros said the United Nations health agency would continue to assess the evolution of the coronavirus crisis and “adjust the advice accordingly.”
According to international health regulations, Tedros said the WHO emergency committee met on Thursday and expects 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.
To date, more than 139 million cases of Covid have been reported worldwide, with 2.9 million deaths, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.
The WHO declared the coronavirus a global pandemic on March 11 last year.
“Shocking imbalance”
Tedros said earlier that one of the WHO’s top priorities is to increase COVAX’s ambition, an initiative that works for 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 has so far distributed only 38 million doses.
The WHO said it hoped the initiative would be able to recover in the coming months, but condemned what it described as a “shocking imbalance” in vaccine distribution among high-income and low-income countries.
The health agency also criticized countries that sought their own vaccination offers outside the COVAX initiative for political or commercial reasons.
Earlier this year, WHO’s Tedros warned that the world was on the brink of “catastrophic moral failure” due to vaccine inequality.
He said a “self-first” approach to vaccines would put the world’s poorest and most vulnerable at risk, adding that the approach was “self-defeating” because it would encourage hoarding and likely prolong the health crisis.