WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, in a briefing from Geneva, declared COVID-19 to be 10 times more deadlier than the swine flu, also called H1N1 that caused a global.pandemic in 2009. The only solution to terminate the proliferation of the coronavirus is a vaccine.
Above 1.9 million people have been the victims of the novel coronavirus globally and more than 1 lakh people lost their lives.
WHO says almost 18,500 people died due to swine flu or H1N1 in 2009 while The Lancet conjectured the death toll between 151,700 and 575,400 including deaths in Africa and South East Asia that were not taken into consideration by the WHO. The H1N1 outbreak, also declared a pandemic in June 2009 and believed to have been over by 2010, was first unveiled in Mexico and gradually transpired to be not as malignant as it was dreaded.
Some countries are experiencing an upsurge in their COVID-19 cases every three to four consecutive days. Tedros bemoaned that had the countries effectuated to “early case-finding, testing, isolating and caring for every case and tracing every contact”, the virus could have been restricted.
In more than half of the countries across the globe, people have been asked to follow social isolation as lockdowns have been enforced to curb the pandemic. Tedros alerted that the disease will continue to grow with the revival of global communications. He even highlighted that the deceleration of the novel coronavirus would be much slower that it’s escalation. Hence control measures must be eased slowly and steadily keeping in view steps for public health are intact, including considerable contact tracing.
Irrespective of every attempt, WHO proclaimed the need for a vaccine to finally put a stop in the spreading of the virus.
