LatAm, Caribbean virus cases hit 5M

GENEVA: Latin America and the Caribbean surpassed 5 million coronavirus cases on Monday (Tuesday in Manila) as the World Health Organization (WHO) warned there might never be a “silver bullet” for the pandemic.

Global infections passed 18 million, with Brazil driving the regional surge. South America’s largest country has recorded 2.75 million cases and close to half the region’s 202,000 deaths. Only the United States, with 4.7 million cases and more than 155,000 deaths, has been worse affected.

In the region’s second hardestcountry, Peru, daily cases had almost doubled from 3,300 to 6,300 since bus and air travel resumed a month ago, according to official figures.

The world’s hope of ending the current cycle of outbreaks and lockdowns rests on a vaccine, but the WHO said governments and citizens should focus on what is known to work: testing, contact tracing, maintaining physical distance and wearing a face 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 was “extraordinarily widespread” in the US.

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 hard-hit state of Victoria on Monday.

They include a nighttime curfew in state capital Melbourne for the next six weeks, with the city ordering non-essential 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 demoralized,” he told Agence France- Presse (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.

In the US, Deborah Birx, head of the White House coronavirus task force, warned the country has entered a “new phase.”

“What we are seeing today is different from March and April,” she said, adding that the virus “is extraordinarily widespread.”

The pandemic has spurred a rush for a vaccine that some have compared to the space race, and Russia said on Monday it was aiming to launch mass production in September and turn out “several million” doses per month by next year.

But Vitaly Zverev, laboratory chief at the Mechnikov Research Institute of Vaccines and Sera, told AFP that it was “impossible to ensure a vaccine’s safety in the time that has passed since the beginning of this pandemic.”

“You can make anything, but who is going to buy it?” The impositions the pandemic has put on daily life has sparked protests on nearly every continent.