The World Health Organization (WHO) asked countries this Wednesday not to lower the alert on Covid-19, despite the improvements, complaining that deaths and hospitalizations are being underreported.
According to the WHO, only 25% of the world’s countries reported deaths from Covid-19 in July and 11% reported hospitalizations and admissions to intensive care units.
“It does not mean that the other countries have stopped having deaths and hospitalizations, they simply have not reported them,” warned this Wednesday, at the usual WHO press conference, the organization’s director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
For Ghebreyesus, despite the fact that “the risk of death and serious cases” is “less than a year ago”, due to the increasing immunization of the population, the WHO “continues to consider the risk of Covid-19 to public health to be high “. .
“The virus continues to circulate in all countries, it continues to kill and mutate,” he warned, cautiously noting that “the risk of a dangerous variant emerging that could cause a sudden increase in infections and fatal cases persists.”
In May, the WHO declared the end of Covid-19 an international public health emergency, but according to the director general, a committee of experts continues to meet regularly to discuss the response to the SARS-CoV-2 virus. , at the origin of Covid-19.
Following the recommendations of this committee, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on Wednesday called on WHO member states to maintain certain preventive measures, such as immunization of risk groups, and to inform the organization about deaths and hospitalizations.
The WHO has recorded, since the start of the pandemic, in 2020, more than 768 million infected in the world and 6.9 million deaths.
Covid-19 is a respiratory disease caused by SARS-CoV-2, a type of virus detected at the end of 2019 in China and which has spread rapidly throughout the world, assuming several variants and subvariants, some more contagious than others. .
Since March 11, 2020, Covid-19 is a pandemic.
Source: TSF
