The UN advocates a vaccine against COVID-19 for all

The death toll from the new coronavirus in the world was approaching 200,000 this Saturday, as the UN launched an international initiative to find a vaccine against the pandemic, which confined millions of Muslims at the beginning of Ramadan.

Governments worldwide are making efforts to limit the economic devastation caused by the virus, which has infected 2.8 million people and confines half humanity to their homes.

While in Europe the contagion curve seems to be beginning its downward phase and in Latin America it is on the upward phase, the World Health Organization (WHO) launched a “collaboration historical “ to accelerate the production of vaccines and treatments against COVID-19, explained its director, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

Fighting the current pandemic will mean “most massive public health effort in history”said UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres.

Vaccines must be safe, accessible and available to allGuterres stressed in the virtual meeting, in which the leaders of France and Germany participated.

But notably absent were China, the country where the pandemic emerged in late 2019, and the United States, which accuses the WHO of not warning early about the pandemic.

– A different Ramadan –

The Muslim world began Ramadan this Friday, during which believers abstain from eating and drinking from sunrise to sunset and which is traditionally a period for sharing and gathering. It is also a period of prayer and recollection in which Muslims flock to mosques, especially in the afternoon and evening.

But most Muslim countries in the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia have closed mosques and banned night congregations, to the approval of religious authorities.

In the holy city of Mecca, the Grand Mosque, which usually hosts tens of thousands of worshipers during Ramadan, was deserted after religious authorities suspended Umrah, a pilgrimage that Muslims can take at any time of the year.

In places like Bangladesh, Pakistan and Indonesia – the world’s most populous Muslim country – conservative clerics and politicians, however, rejected measures of social distancing and refused to annul congregations in mosques.

– “Armageddon” –

The UN vaccine initiative was announced a day after US President Donald Trump sparked dismay and ridicule by suggesting that COVID-19 could be treated with industrial disinfectant.

“I see the disinfectant knocks him out in a minute. In a minute. Wouldn’t there be some way to do something like that with an injection inside or almost a cleaning?”, he asked himself. “Sounds interesting”.

Faced with the uproar it caused – experts and manufacturers were quick to warn against this experiment – the president assured this Friday that he was speaking “sarcastically”.

Deaths from COVID-19 in the world exceed 195,000, according to an AFP balance, but the number of new cases seems to have stabilized at around 80,000 per day after the application of quarantine measures in most of the world.

The daily death toll in Western countries seems to be falling, but the WHO continues to insist that it is not time to reduce efforts and that a second pandemic wave may come at any time.

The United States is the country most affected by the pandemic, with 870,000 confirmed cases and 51,017 deaths, although in the last 24 hours it registered its lowest daily death toll in almost three weeks.

The pandemic continues to devastate economies, forcing authorities to try to develop plans to incentivize recovery quickly.

The collapse of oil linked to the lack of demand caused by the economic slowdown due to confinement measures pushed the Venezuelan barrel to $ 9.9, its lowest level in two decades. “It is a kind of Armageddon” for Venezuela, highly dependent on crude oil exports, and already mired in a deep economic and social crisis, said oil expert Francisco Monaldi.

More than 26 million Americans have fallen into unemployment since mid-March, and according to forecasts by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) the GDP of the world’s first economy will contract 12% in the second quarter of the year and its deficit The federal government will skyrocket to $ 3.7 trillion, due to the financial stimulus measures taken.

Trump signed a new $ 483 billion aid plan for small and medium-sized businesses and hospitals on Friday, in addition to the $ 2.2 trillion approved in late March to try to revive the U.S. economy that has lost 26 millions of jobs in five weeks.

Despite criticism, including from Trump, the governor of the state of Georgia allowed the opening of businesses where maintaining social distance is difficult, including gyms, hairdressers and tattoo parlors.

Meanwhile, several European countries are beginning to ease their restrictions, and others, such as Italy or France, are preparing to do so soon, encouraged by positive indicators in the number of sick and deceased.

– In full swing in Latin America –

Latin America is close to 150,000 infections and exceeds 7,300 deaths.

And the worst is yet to come, according to the WHO, particularly in countries like Brazil, where 3,670 people have died from COVID-19, or Mexico, which exceeds 1,000 deaths.

Mexico is in a “phase of rapid rise in the daily number of cases and we will continue to have more and more cases of disease”, warned the undersecretary of Health, Hugo López-Gatell.

In the face of the pandemic, Peru will keep all its borders and airports closed for an indefinite time, but Venezuela will try to relax the quarantine for children and the elderly.

In Argentina, with more than 3,500 cases and 176 deaths, dozens of prisoners rioted in a Buenos Aires jail in protest of a coronavirus case, before agreeing to a truce until Saturday.

In a small Nicaraguan town, on the other hand, they do not seem to mind the spread of the virus. Hundreds of people from San Marcos, 45 km south of Managua, celebrated the patron saint festivities without taking protective measures against the pandemic.

With AFP