Last July, only 25% of the countries in the world reported deaths from covid, and an even smaller percentage, 11%, reported hospitalizations and admissions to intensive care units due to the disease, as warned this Wednesday. the World Health Organization (WHO), which asked governments not to lower the alert. “It does not mean that the rest of the countries have stopped having deaths and hospitalizations, but that they do not report them,” the director general of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, warned at a press conference.
”There is no doubt that the risk of death or serious cases is now much lower than a year ago, due to the growing immunization of the population thanks to vaccines and infections, but despite the improvement, the WHO continues to consider the risk to be high. public health risk of covid ”, added Tedros, while recalling that they are currently tracking several variants of coronavirus, including the EG.5 variant (the Eris) that is spreading in the United States and the United Kingdom . “The risk of a more dangerous variant emerging that could cause a surge in cases and deaths remains,” Tedros said.
Although Tedros himself declared the end of the international coronavirus emergency on May 5, this Wednesday he stressed that “the virus continues to circulate in all countries, it continues to kill and mutate”, and “the danger persists that a dangerous variant will emerge that could cause a sudden increase in infections and fatal cases,” said Tedros, who recalled that despite the end of the international emergency, a WHO expert committee continues to meet regularly to analyze the response to the virus.
Following the recommendations of this committee, Tedros has launched an appeal to the member countries of the WHO to maintain certain preventive measures against the coronavirus, which include “continuing to offer vaccines to risk groups” and informing the WHO of deaths. and hospitalizations for the disease. “At the WHO we do not forget about the disease, and neither should governments,” concluded the head of the UN health agency.
Since the start of the pandemic at the end of 2019, the WHO has recorded more than 768 million cases of the disease worldwide, 6.9 million of them fatal, making the health crisis one of the most serious since the caused by the flu in 1918. Compared to the worst moments of the pandemic, in which more than 20 million weekly cases were reported globally (at the beginning of 2022 with the omicron variant), only about 10,000 were reported. infections in Europe and 20,000 in America during the last week of July, although the numbers were still relatively high in Asia-Pacific, with around 288,000 positives.
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