Officials store coffins, some marked “risk of infection,” while others have chalk-scrawled “corona” in the crematorium’s mourning hall in Meissen, eastern Germany, on January 13, 2021, in the midst of the new coronavirus pandemic. COVID-19. cremation.
Jens Schlueter | AFP | Getty Images
The World Health Organization said on Friday that coronavirus vaccines are not “silver bullets” and that relying solely on them to fight the pandemic has hurt nations.
Some countries in Europe, Africa and the Americas are seeing spikes in Covid-19 cases “because collectively we are failing to break transmission chains at the community level or within families,” said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, during a news conference from the agency’s headquarters in Geneva.
With global deaths reaching 2 million and new variants of the virus appearing in several countries, world leaders must do everything they can to contain infections “through tried and tested public health measures,” said Tedros. “There is only one way out of this storm: to share the tools we have and commit to using them together.”
The coronavirus has infected more than 93.3 million people worldwide and has killed at least 2 million since the pandemic began about a year ago, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. The virus continues to accelerate in some regions, with nations reporting that their oxygen supply to patients with Covid-19 is “dangerously low,” the WHO said.
Some countries, including the United States, have focused heavily on using vaccines to combat their outbreaks. Although vaccines are a useful tool, they will not end the pandemic alone, Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO health emergency program, told a news conference.
“We warned in 2020 that if we depended entirely on vaccines as the only solution, we could lose the very controlled measures that we had at the time. And I think that to some extent this has become a reality,” said Ryan, adding the cooler seasons and the Recent holidays may also have played a role in the spread of the virus.
“A large part of the transmission occurred because we are reducing our physical distance. … We are not breaking the transmission chains. The virus is exploiting our lack of tactical compromise, ”he added. “We are not doing as well as we could.”
Dr. Bruce Aylward, a senior adviser to the WHO director-general, echoed Ryan’s comments, saying that vaccines are not “silver bullets”
“Things can get worse, the numbers can go up,” he said. We have vaccines, yes. But we have limited supplies of vaccines that will be released slowly around the world. And vaccines are not perfect. They do not protect everyone from all situations. “
In the United States, the rate of vaccination is slower than the authorities expected. On Friday, at 6:00 am ET, more than 31.1 million doses of the vaccine were delivered in the United States, but just over 12.2 million injections were administered, according to data compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Diseases.
Meanwhile, cases are growing rapidly, with the U.S. registering at least 238,800 new cases of Covid-19 and at least 3,310 virus-related deaths each day, based on a seven-day average calculated by CNBC using data from Johns Hopkins .
On Thursday, President-elect Joe Biden unveiled a broad plan to combat the coronavirus pandemic in the United States. At the same time that your government will invest billions in a vaccine campaign, it will also increase testing, invest in new treatments and work to identify new strains, among other measures.