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11:03 pm
Monday 28 December 2020
Geneva – (AFP)
The World Health Organization warned Monday night that despite the severity of the Covid-19 pandemic, which has caused more than 1.7 million deaths and tens of millions injured in a year, it is imperative to prepare to worst”.
“This is a wake-up call,” said the director of the World Health Organization’s emergency program, Michael Ryan, at the last press conference this year for the organization that is on the front lines in the fight against worst pandemic the world has seen in a hundred years.
Ryan, who has faced the most dangerous diseases in the field in his professional life, warned: “This pandemic is very acute. It has spread rapidly around the world and has reached every corner of the planet, but it is not necessarily the worst”.
He acknowledged that the virus “spreads very easily and kills humans,” but stressed that “the death rate is relatively low compared to other new diseases.” He stressed the need to “prepare in the future for what could be worse.”
His colleague Bruce Aylward, WHO advisor, agreed with this opinion, who considered that despite the achievements made in the fight against Covid-19, including the production of effective vaccines in record time, the world is still far from ready. to combat future pandemics.
“We are in the second and third waves of this virus and we are not ready and cannot handle it yet,” Aylward said at the press conference.
He stressed that “although we are more prepared, we are not fully prepared for the current one (pandemic), and we are less prepared for the one that is coming.”
For his part, the director general of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, preferred to see the positive side.
Tedros said: “On the level of consciousness, I think we are ready”, emphasizing that the time has come to “take things very seriously”, adding that things require “greater ambition.”
