2023-04-27 02:47:21
On Wednesday, the World Health Organization announced that deaths from the Covid-19 virus had decreased by 95 percent since the beginning of the year, but warned that the virus was still present.
“It is encouraging to see this continuous decrease in reported deaths from COVID-19, which has fallen by 95 percent since the beginning of this year,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a press conference.
“However, some countries are witnessing increases in death rates, and during the past four weeks, 14,000 people have lost their lives due to this disease,” he added.
“The emergence of the new XBB.1.16 mutant shows that the virus is still mutating, and is still capable of causing new waves,” he warned.
Maria van Kerkhove, technical director of the World Health Organization’s Emergencies Programme, said the XBB subspecies were now dominant worldwide.
She pointed out that these mutants are characterized by growth and the ability to evade the immune system, which means that infected people can catch the virus again despite taking vaccines.
She called for increased surveillance through testing “so we can monitor the virus itself and understand what all these variants mean”.
Tedros reaffirmed that the World Health Organization still hopes to declare an end to Covid-19 as a health emergency in the world, as the committee reporting to it on the virus situation is scheduled to meet next month.
“This virus is here to stay, and all countries need to learn how to deal with it along with other infectious diseases,” he said.
Tedros noted that an estimated 1 in 10 cases of infection has caused long-term Covid, which means that hundreds of millions of people will need long-term care.
The head of the World Health Organization also revealed that the Covid-19 epidemic caused the disruption of vaccination programs for other diseases, as about 67 million children lost at least one basic vaccine injection between 2019 and 2021.
He said that vaccination rates have declined to what they were in 2008, which led to outbreaks of measles, diphtheria, polio and yellow fever, calling on all countries to confront “obstacles to vaccination.”
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