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This image taken on September 9, 2020 shows a hospital worker performing a Muslim funeral prayer over the coffin carrying the body of a patient who succumbed to the COVID-19 coronavirus, at Bogor General Hospital in Bogor, West Java. (Photo by ADEK BERRY / AFP)
The weekly COVID-19 death toll of around 50,000 lives is unacceptably high, the World Health Organization said on Friday as the 1 million death milestone approaches.
The WHO said that although global death and infection rates from the new coronavirus were stagnating rather than rising exponentially, global figures masked sudden increases at the lower regional and local levels.
The respiratory disease has killed nearly 947,000 people since the outbreak emerged in China last December, according to a count from official sources compiled by AFP, while more than 30.2 million cases have been recorded.
“We are adding about 1.8 to two million cases per week to the global case count, and an average between 40,000 and 50,000 deaths,” said WHO emergency director Michael Ryan at a virtual press conference.
“Fortunately, that is not increasing exponentially. This is an enormously high figure to settle for. That is not where we want to be.
“Even though those numbers are flat globally, that hides the fact that regionally and subregionally in some countries, we are seeing significant increases in cases.”
Ryan said the pandemic still has “a long way to go” and although the proportion of infected people dying had decreased as treatment techniques improved, “we cannot accept 50,000 deaths per week as an acceptable number.”
Worrisome trends
Much of Europe prepared on Friday to implement new sweeping restrictions to stop the coronavirus and Israel imposed a second national lockdown.
Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO technical lead on COVID-19, said the UN health agency was seeing “worrying trends in the Northern Hemisphere” in terms of the number of cases, hospitalizations and admissions to intensive care, “and neither We haven’t even started the flu season yet. “
“The circulation of other respiratory pathogens will complicate the clinical picture,” he added.
And while the world waits for a vaccine (36 are currently being tested in humans), the American said that some countries had learned during the pandemic that they could overcome the virus with measures already available.
“As we approach 30 million cases and one million deaths, we have a long way to go,” he said.
“But we are in a different place than we were in January.
“We know much more now, and countries are showing us that they can use the tools they have now to break the chains of transmission and save lives.”
Meanwhile, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus lamented the recurring pattern of money going to virus outbreaks, only after the event.
“COVID-19 has shown that on the whole the world was woefully ill-prepared,” he said.
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