At a press conference this Tuesday (1/24), the director-general of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said that, in the last eight weeks, at least 170,000 deaths from Covid-19 have been recorded. pandemic cannot yet be considered over.
“Although we are clearly in a better situation than we were three years ago when the pandemic began, the collective global response is again under strain. Few people—especially the elderly and health care workers—are adequately vaccinated; many are behind on reinforcements. For a large part of the population, antivirals continue to be very expensive and difficult to access, and many are still not receiving adequate treatment”, warns the WHO director-general.
The technical director of the entity, Maria Van Kerkhove, says that although the world has been living with the coronavirus for three years, there is still much to discover about the pathogen and it is necessary to find a middle ground in the epidemiological surveillance of Covid-19.
“We do not expect countries to maintain surveillance levels as they were at the peaks of the pandemic or when Omicron was identified. You have to calibrate the alert, but keep testing,” she says.
Maria points out that there are three main reasons for not completely abandoning testing. First, so that governments know what they are dealing with; second, because the tests are essential to ensure that patients receive treatment in a timely manner and can isolate themselves to protect those close to them. Thirdly, so that you can monitor what is happening in risk groups, and see if the virus is behaving differently in these populations.
WHO emergencies director Michael Ryan recalls that the world has made a lot of progress in testing in the last three years, and it is important to use this new structure acquired to monitor not only the coronavirus, but other pathogens that are circulating, such as influenza.
“We had a meeting with representatives from Somalia this week, and he told us that, before the pandemic, the country did not even have a laboratory that carried out PCR tests. Today, there are more than 30. We had a very large expansion in the world’s testing capacity”, he explains.
Covid wins
Questioned about the long-term Covid situation, the directors say that the entity is following several studies and thinking about how long-term treatment will be. Some of the priorities of the WHO are to define exactly the disease and what are its symptoms so that the diagnosis can be made more clearly, to understand how it happens and how reinfection affects the development of the condition, and to decide how the treatment should be carried out.
′′ Some estimates realize that one in 10 people infected with the coronavirus may have long Covid. We don’t have all the answers yet, but we need governments to plan to respond to patient demand”, says the technical director.
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