Coronavirus may never go away, like HIV, WHO warns

GENEVA: The new coronavirus may never go away and populations around the world will have to learn to live with it, the WHO warned Wednesday. “We have a new virus entering the human population for the first time and therefore it is very hard to predict when we will prevail over it,” said Michael Ryan, the WHO’s emergencies director. “This virus may become just another endemic virus in our communities and never go away,” he said.

WASHINGTON: Researchers behind a widely cited model on Tuesday revised their projection for Covid-19 deaths in the US to more than 147,000 as curbs continued to be relaxed around the country. The projection is 10,000 higher than the previous estimate.

The latest forecast from the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) of the University of Washington came hours after the Trump administration’s top public health officials warned lawmakers at a US senate hearing of “little spikes that might turn into outbreaks” because of premature reopening.

The IHME attributed the “higher” projection to “changes in testing and mobility, as well as easing of distancing policies”.

Public health officials are urging caution as many US states backed by President Donald Trump - have allowed some businesses to reopen and lifted some restrictions on public life. The Trump administration’s experts have a different assessment of the battle against the pandemic as the US reported 1,674 new deaths.

“It depends on what you mean by containment,” Anthony Fauci, the top US epidemiologist and member of the White House coronavirus task force, said at a Senate hearing when asked if the outbreak had been contained. “If you think we have it completely under control, we don’t.”

Robert Redfield, head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told US senators, “We are not out of the woods yet.”

Meanwhile, some Republican senators moved a legislation seeking to authorise Trump to impose sanctions against China for not giving “full accounting” over its role in the outbreak. “The Chinese Communist Party must be held accountable for the detrimental role they played in this pandemic,” said senator Jim Inhofe, a sponsor of the Covid-19 Accountability Act.