WHO chief warns world is ‘increasingly blind’ to Covid despite reporting low death totals

The COVID-19 pandemic seems to be coming to an end with hospitalizations and death rates worldwide, and even Dr. Anthony Fauci said that the United States may have passed this stage in the life of the virus, but some important names in the World Health Organization (WHO) still give serious warnings.

At a press conference on Tuesday, Dr. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that people are still fed up with the virus, and that the decline in general testing and Kovid surveillance in many countries puts the world at risk of a resurgence of the virus.

On the same day, WHO also reported that 15,668 people worldwide died from Covid within a seven-day period; this is one of the lowest numbers since the outbreak of the pandemic in March 2020.

Also Tuesday, Fauci, the nation’s leading expert on infectious diseases and the nation’s chief medical officer during the outbreak, told PBS’s NewsHour that America believes the virus has passed the pandemic stage as cases and deaths remain low.

There are currently 54,840 Covid infections per day in America, 45% more than last week, but more than 90% less than the virus’ peak of 800,000 per day. The daily death toll fell 14% last week to 363 per day.

Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (left), WHO director-general, warned that the withdrawal of Covid testing and surveillance will blind the world. Dr. The country’s leading infectious disease expert, Anthony Fauci (right), said on Tuesday he believes America has passed the stage of the Covid epidemic.

†[Rolling back of Covid surveillance] this is making us increasingly blind to models of transmission and evolution. But this virus will not go away just because countries stopped looking for it. It is still spreading, still changing, and still deadly,” Ghebreyesus said.

Covid testing and monitoring has been severely restricted in parts of the Americas and Europe as authorities acted to divert funds to pandemic-related efforts elsewhere.

In the United States, funding has been discontinued to cover the cost of free testing for many Americans. Hospital treatment for the virus is also no longer covered by the federal government. Test disruptions have been so severe that some experts warn that more than 90% of cases in the United States go undetected.

“While the threat of a new dangerous variant is very real and the death toll is declining, we still do not understand the long-term consequences of infection on survivors,” Ghebreyesus said.

“Ignorance is not bliss when it comes to a deadly virus. WHO continues to invite all countries to watch,” he said.

WHO has been one of the more cautious, even dissenting, voices during the pandemic, constantly issuing dire warnings about the state of the virus as many begin to experience sudden declines.

One of the other more cautious voices during Covid was Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, but he is also starting to take comfort in the situation of the virus.

He said in the news on Tuesday that America has overcome the pandemic, but that it still exists in other parts of the world.

“If you say we are out of the pandemic process in this country, we did. What we hope to do – and I’ve talked a lot about it – I don’t think we’ll be able to get rid of this virus. “If we can really keep that level very low and vaccinate people intermittently, and I don’t know how many times that has to happen,” he said.

It could be every year to keep it low, it could be longer. But right now, we are not in the pandemic period in this country. Pandemic means a worldwide infection that spreads rapidly among humans.

“If you look at the global situation, there is no doubt that this epidemic is still going on.”

Even among the most cautious health officials, this latest change in public opinion about the pandemic has also been reflected in recent changes to Covid-related orders and orders, even if football isn’t playing all over America.

Covid restrictions have been lifted almost everywhere in America. One of the few remaining missions is in New York City, where residents are still required to wear masks on the subway, public buses, and at the airport.

Masks are also mandatory on public transport in Los Angeles. Philadelphia also reduced the order of masks for four days last week, and they removed them again almost immediately.

Children under the age of five in the New York City public school system are still subject to “close contact restrictions”, including wearing masks, an awkward break from the rest of the city where there is no mask requirement. Virologists generally agree that the risk of children becoming seriously ill or dying from Covid is extremely low.

The federal government’s National Masking Order for Public Transport, Commercial Flights and Transportation Centers was rejected by a federal judge earlier this month.

However, cases of Covid are starting to rise in most of America, and 42 states now include the increase in the number of cases in their official data.

Part of this may be due to irregular data reports, where the number fluctuates greatly on a daily basis, depending on how the government has changed the way it reports daily numbers over the past few weeks.