WHO urges countries to be ready to quickly identify Covid-19 cases while easing restrictions, Europe News & Top Stories



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GENEVA (XINHUA) – The World Health Organization (WHO) said on Friday (May 8) that countries that lift the restrictions and open their economies should be ready to quickly identify Covid-19 cases if they resurface.

“I think we are going to be in a situation where we may need to lift some of these measures, but be ready to quickly identify those cases,” said Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, technical lead for the Covid-19 response. in WHO health emergencies. Program, at the press conference on Friday.

“There may be a kind of ‘push and pull’ for some time as we really try to work and suppress this virus worldwide,” he added.

She said that several countries are opening up their economies after showing that they can suppress transmission.

“The countries that are most advanced in this are countries in Asia, and we see that countries like China, Japan, South Korea and Singapore have put up some of these public and social health measures slowly and in a controlled way.”

“We are learning from those countries that are slowly opening their economies again,” he said.

“In Japan and Singapore, for example, they have seen outbreaks occurring in certain situations. Right now, Singapore is dealing with outbreaks in residences and expat residences where people live very close to each other,” he noted, and He added that Singapore has presented how they try to find all those cases and suppress transmission even in closed environments.

According to Kerkhove, countries are improving their systems to identify the virus and infected people through increased capabilities in both testing and contact tracing. Meanwhile, these countries also ensured the availability of hospital beds to care for patients.

“So what we are seeing is that even though they are lifting some of these measures, they are working quickly to find cases, if those cases do come back, so they can try to suppress transmission again,” he explained.



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