Employees store coffins, some marked with a “risk of infection”, while others have a “crown” scratched in chalk in the mourning room of the crematorium in Meissen, eastern Germany, on January 13, 2021, amid the new COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic . incineration.
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 seeing increases in Covid-19 cases “because we are not able to collectively break down transmission chains at Community or household level,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a conference at Geneva Agency.
With deaths worldwide reaching 2 million and new variants of the virus appearing in several countries, world leaders must do everything they can to reduce infections “through tried and tested public health measures,” Tedros said. “There is only one way out of this storm and that is to share the tools we have and commit to using them together.”
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 compiled by Johns Hopkins University. The virus continues to accelerate in some regions, with nations reporting that their supply of oxygen to Covid-19 patients is “dangerously low,” the WHO said.
Some countries, including the United States, have strongly focused on using vaccines to control their outbreaks. While vaccines are a useful tool, they will not end the pandemic alone, Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO’s health emergency program, told a news conference.
“We warned in 2020 that if we had to rely entirely on vaccines as the only solution, we could lose the very controlled measures we had at the time. And I think to some extent that has come true.” , said Ryan. , adding the colder seasons and recent holidays could also have played a role in the spread of the virus.
“Much of the transmission has taken place because we are reducing our physical distance … 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 Director-General of WHO, echoed Ryan’s comments, saying vaccines are not “silver bullets”
“Things can get worse, numbers can increase,” he said. We have vaccines, yes. But we have a limited number of vaccines that will be released slowly around the world. And vaccines are not perfect. It does not protect everyone from any situation. “
In the US, the pace of vaccinations is slower than officials hoped. As of Friday, at 6 a.m. ET, more than 31.1 million doses of vaccine had been distributed in the United States, but just over 12.2 million photos had been administered, according to data compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Meanwhile, cases are growing rapidly, with the US recording at least 238,800 new cases of Covid-19 and at least 3,310 virus-related deaths each day, based on a seven-day average calculated by CNBC using Johns Hopkins data.
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 vaccination campaign, it will expand testing, invest in new treatments and work to identify new strains, among other measures.