‘No silver bullet’ for virus, WHO warns, as cases top 18 million

THE World Health Organisation yesterday warned there might never be a “silver bullet” for the coronavirus, as Australia’s second-largest city went under curfew and the number of global infections passed 18 million.

The world’s hope of ending the current cycle of outbreaks and lockdowns rests on a vaccine, but the UN health agency said governments and citizens should focus on what is known to work: testing, contact tracing, maintaining physical distance and wearing a mask.

“We all hope to have a number of effective vaccines that can help prevent people from infection,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a virtual press conference.

“However, there’s no silver bullet at the moment — and there might never be,” he said.

“For now, stopping outbreaks comes down to the basics of public health and disease control. Do it all.”

Despite months of economically crippling restrictions, the pandemic is gathering pace with the worldwide death toll nearing 700 000 and a White House adviser warning the virus is “extraordinarily widespread” in the United States.

There has been a resurgence in countries that had previously brought their outbreaks under control, including Australia, where sweeping new restrictions kicked in for the hardhit state of Victoria yesterday.

They include a nighttime curfew in state capital Melbourne for the next six weeks, with the city ordering nonessential businesses to close, and a ban on weddings.

Melbourne book store manager Bill Morton said his normally “vibrant, lovely” patch of the city had transformed into a “ghost town”.

“People are pretty demoralised,” he told AFP. “Pretty well everything is closed around here. So it’s a very strange, quite eerie atmosphere.”

Authorities in the Philippines have also had to reimpose curbs after infections surged past 100 000, forcing more than 27 million people -including in the capital Manila -- back into lockdown for two weeks from Tuesday.

The Middle East’s hardest-hit nation Iran meanwhile reported its highest single-day infection count in nearly a month, warning that most of its provinces are facing a resurgence. — AFP.