WHO: Coronavirus crisis may get ‘worse and worse and worse’

The raging coronavirus pandemic has the potential to get far worse if all nations do not adhere to basic healthcare precautions, the World Health Organization (WHO) warned on Monday.

“If basics are not followed, the only way this pandemic is going to go, it is going to get worse and worse and worse. But it does not have to be this way.”

“Let me be blunt, too many countries are headed in the wrong direction, the virus remains public enemy number one,” Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a virtual briefing from WHO headquarters in Geneva.

Infections rose above 13 million across the world on Monday, according to a Reuters tally, climbing by one million in just five days in a pandemic that has killed more than half a million people.

“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 U.N. agency’s headquarters in Geneva.

“If basics are not followed, the only way this pandemic is going to go – it is going to get worse and worse and worse.”

Global infections stand at 13 million, according to a Reuters tally, with more than half a million deaths.

Tedros, whose leadership has been criticised by U.S. President Donald Trump, said that of 230,000 new cases on Sunday, 80% were from 10 nations, and 50% from just two countries.

The United States and Brazil have been 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 U.S. pullout announced by Trump. The U.S. president says 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.

Arab Observer