WHO: Coronavirus crisis may get ‘worse and worse and worse’
The new coronavirus pandemic raging around the globe will worsen if countries fail to adhere to strict health care precautions, the World Health Organization (WHO) warned on Monday.
“Let me be blunt, too many countries are headed in the wrong direction, the virus remains public enemy number one,” WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a virtual briefing from the UN agency’s headquarters in Geneva, Reuters reported.
“If basics are not followed, the only way this pandemic is going to go – it is going to get worse and worse and worse.”
The pandemic has killed at least 573,091 people worldwide since it surfaced in China late last year, according to an AFP tally at 1100 GMT on Tuesday based on official sources.
Tedros, whose leadership has been criticized by US President Donald Trump, said that of 230,000 new cases on Sunday, 80 percent were from 10 nations and 50 percent from just two countries.
The United States and Brazil have been the worst hit.
WHO emergencies head Mike Ryan said some places in the Americas may need “limited or geographically focused lockdowns that suppress transmission in specific areas where transmission is frankly out of control”.
He urged countries not to make schools into a political football, saying schools could safely reopen once the virus had been suppressed.
Tedros said the WHO had still not received formal notification of the US pullout announced by
Trump. The US president said the WHO pandered to China, where the COVID-19 disease was first detected, at the start of the crisis.
Trump, who at the weekend wore a protective face mask in public for the first time, has himself been accused by political opponents of not taking the coronavirus seriously enough, something he denies.
A two-member WHO advance team in China to investigate the origins of the coronavirus, first discovered in the city of Wuhan, is in quarantine, as per standard procedure, before beginning work with Chinese scientists, Ryan said.