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Coronavirus pandemic far from over, global health chiefs warn

THE coronavirus pandemic is far from over, World Health Organisation (WHO) chief Tedros Ghebreyesus warned on Monday, with cases continuing to rise despite the global vaccination programme.

Since new infection rates stopped falling in February there have been seven consecutive weeks and increasing cases and four weeks of increasing deaths, he told a press briefing.

Mr Ghebreyesus called for a “consistent co-ordinated and comprehensive approach” to tackling the pandemic, taking aim at countries “where restaurants and nightclubs are full, markets are open and crowded, with few people taking precautions.”

Some 780 million Covid-19 vaccines have now been administered worldwide, but the global health chief declared the unfair distribution of the doses “a moral outrage” and “epidemiologically and economically self-defeating.”

More than 87 per cent of the doses have been given to people in high or upper-middle-income countries. By contrast, low-income countries have received just 0.2 per cent of the vaccines.

Mr Ghebreyesus said that with a co-ordinated approach, the pandemic could be brought under control within a couple of months. 

But he said that a failure to vaccinate the world population could see new variants of the disease emerge, prolonging the pandemic for years. 

“The more transmission, the more variants. And the more variants that emerge, the more likely it is that they will evade vaccines,” he said.

The WHO chief called for the enforcement of public health measures such as wearing masks and social distancing, and stressed that equitable access to the vaccines was vital.

Dr Maria van Kerkhove, the WHO lead on Covid-19, said it “was not the situation we want to be in more than a year into the pandemic.”

“The trajectory of this pandemic is growing. It is growing exponentially,” she said, with more than 4.4 million new cases reported in the past week.

Almost three million people are known to have died from coronavirus since it was first detected in China in December 2019.

India reported 161,736 new coronavirus infections on Tuesday, the world’s highest daily tally, in a total of 13.69 million cases, according to health ministry figures.

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