The World Health Organization (WHO) has warned that the coronavirus will not be the last pandemic and recalled that progress in health will be insufficient if there are no changes in global warming and animal welfare.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned of the “danger of short-term behavior” in a video to commemorate Sunday’s first International Epidemic Preparedness Day.
“History shows that it will not be the last pandemic,” he said, adding that good lessons must be learned from the coronavirus pandemic.
“For a long time, people acted in a cycle of panic and denial,” he said.
“We spend money when the crisis breaks out, but when it is over, we forget and do nothing to prevent the next one. It is the danger of short-term behavior,” lamented the director general of the UN agency.
The first Annual Global Emergency Preparedness Report, published in September 2019, has already warned of humanity’s poor preparedness for major pandemics, a few months before the start of the COVID-19 crisis.
“The pandemic has revealed the close links between human, animal and planetary health,” he said.
“All efforts to improve health systems will be insufficient if they are not accompanied by a critique of the relationship between humans and animals, as well as the existential threat posed by climate change, which makes the Earth a better place. hard to live ”.
The new coronavirus has caused at least 1.75 million deaths and infected 80 million people worldwide after the first cases were detected in China in December 2019, according to the number conducted by AFP through official data.