Six months on from the novel coronavirus outbreak, the WHO on Monday said it was sending a team to China to work toward finding the source — as it warned the pandemic was far from over.
The WHO also warned that in an atmosphere of global division and solicitation of the COVID-19 crisis, it feared the worst was yet to come.
The UN health agency lamented the “very tragic” milestones of 500,000 deaths and 10 million confirmed infections being reached.
Photo: AP
Yesterday also marked six months since the WHO was first informed of the outbreak in the Chinese city of Wuhan.
The WHO is sending a team to China next week in connection with the search for the origin of the virus that sparked the global pandemic.
The organization has been pressing China since early May to invite in its experts to help investigate the animal origins of the virus.
“We can fight the virus better when we know everything about the virus, including how it started,” WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a virtual news conference. “We will be sending a team next week to China to prepare for that, and we hope that that will lead into understanding how the virus started.”
He did not specify the makeup of the team, or what their mission would specifically consist of.
Scientists believe the virus jumped from animals to humans, possibly from a market in Wuhan selling exotic animals for meat.
“Six months ago, none of us could have imagined how our world — and our lives — would be thrown into turmoil by this new virus,” Tedros said.
“We all want this to be over. We all want to get on with our lives, but the hard reality is this is not even close to being over,” he said. “Globally the pandemic is actually speeding up. We’re all in this together, and we’re all in this for the long haul. We have already lost so much — but we cannot lose hope.”
Tedros also said that the pandemic had brought out the best and worst humanity, citing acts of kindness and solidarity, but also misinformation and the politicization of the virus.
Unless international unity replaces fractious division, “the worst is yet to come. I’m sorry to say that,” Tedros said.
“With this kind of environment and condition, we fear the worst,” he added.
While the world races to find safe and effective vaccines and therapeutics against COVID-19, Tedros said that countries such as South Korea had shown that the virus could be successfully suppressed and controlled without them.
He said that governments needed to be “serious” about measures such as contact tracing, and citizens had to take responsibility for personal steps such as maintaining hand hygiene.
Reflecting on the global death toll and infection numbers, Tedros said: “Still, this could have been prevented through the tools we have at hand.”
“The critical question that all countries will face in the coming months is how to live with this virus. That is the new normal,” he added.
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
‘DISAPPEARED COMPLETELY’: The melting of thousands of glaciers is a major threat to people in the landlocked region that already suffers from a water shortage Near a wooden hut high up in the Kyrgyz mountains, scientist Gulbara Omorova walked to a pile of gray rocks, reminiscing how the same spot was a glacier just a few years ago. At an altitude of 4,000m, the 35-year-old researcher is surrounded by the giant peaks of the towering Tian Shan range that also stretches into China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The area is home to thousands of glaciers that are melting at an alarming rate in Central Asia, already hard-hit by climate change. A glaciologist, Omarova is recording that process — worried about the future. She hiked six hours to get to
The number of people in Japan aged 100 or older has hit a record high of more than 95,000, almost 90 percent of whom are women, government data showed yesterday. The figures further highlight the slow-burning demographic crisis gripping the world’s fourth-biggest economy as its population ages and shrinks. As of Sept. 1, Japan had 95,119 centenarians, up 2,980 year-on-year, with 83,958 of them women and 11,161 men, the Japanese Ministry of Health said in a statement. On Sunday, separate government data showed that the number of over-65s has hit a record high of 36.25 million, accounting for 29.3 percent of
RSS