A senior World Health Organization official announced, Friday, that the time has come for a realistic review of the Covid epidemic, after recording one million deaths from the disease this year.
This outcome is “heartbreaking”, said Maria Van Kerkhove, head of the technical team on Covid-19 at the organization, because all tests, treatments, vaccines and public health measures are available to control the virus.
“Since we are in the third year of the epidemic (…), it is even more tragic that we have the tools that can actually prevent these deaths,” she added in a direct dialogue via the World Health Organization’s social media channels.
“Many of us have become numb to numbers,” she noted. “We need a realistic review. We really need to assess where we are now. We should not be in a situation where 14,000 to 15,000 people die every week,” she said.
Maria Van Kerkhove stressed that the epidemic is not over yet, but that it can be brought to an end while people continue to live their daily lives.
“We just need some extra thinking about that, to be a little more careful,” she said, adding, “A lot of people talk about living with Covid, but we have to live with it responsibly.”
And she warned, “One million deaths this year are not coexistence with Covid, and to have 15,000 deaths per week is not coexistence with Covid responsibly.”
According to the latest WHO statistics, Covid-19 has killed 6.45 million people worldwide since the first infections appeared at the end of 2019 in Wuhan, China. Last week, more than 5.3 million new infections were reported to the United Nations organization. United.
“These are huge numbers, and this is an underestimate,” said Maria Van Kerkhove, given that home tests do not enter the data. “We see this virus spreading intensively around the world,” expressing regret that this virus does not leave us.