The Head of the World Health Organization (WHO), Dr Tedros Ghebreyesus, today (27 Apr) said the COVID-19 pandemic “is far from over” and reported that the WHO “continues to be concerned about the increasing trends in Africa, Eastern Europe, Latin America and some Asian countries.”
Dr Tedros said, “cases and deaths are underreported in many countries in these regions because of low testing capacity.”
In the past week, the WHO delivered supplies to more than 40 countries in Africa, and more are planned.
Globally, WHO has shipped millions of items of personal protective equipment to 105 countries, and lab supplies to more than 127 countries. Later this week WHO will launch its second Strategic Preparedness and Response Plan, with an estimate of the resources needed for the next stage of the global response.
In Europe, the Director-General said that as lockdowns ease with declining numbers of new cases, WHO continues to urge countries “to find, isolate, test and treat all cases and trace every contact, to ensure these declining trends continue.”
WHO’s Health Emergencies Programme Executive Director Dr Michael Ryan said, “we don't know how quickly, and we don't know for sure which are the measures that will result in a successful exit strategy. We do know, for example, I think everyone agrees, that large scale mass gatherings are not a good thing, but what all governments are really grappling with now, is well, can we open the schools are part of our school system at the moment? Can we open part of our economy? Essential workers, construction, transport systems.”
Ryan said “there are requirements that allow you to ease the lockdowns without having a tremendous danger of a negative outcome. But nothing is certain at this point. And that's why we're watching very closely, each and every country to see what lessons are being learned. And we will ensure that those lessons are shared between countries.”
Dr Tedros stressed that the WHO does not have a mandate “to force countries to implement what we advise them. It's up to the countries to take our advice or reject it. But we give our advice based on the best science and evidence.””
The Technical lead of WHO’s Health Emergencies Programme, Dr Maria Van Kerkhove, said, “right now, there are no studies that evaluate the antibody response as it relates to immunity. So, we can't say that an antibody response means that someone is immune Having said that, there are a number of studies underway and we, and we expect this, this is a very active area of research. We expect people that are infected with COVID-19 to develop a response that has some level of protection. What we don't know right now is how strong that protection is and if that's seen in everybody that is infected and for how long that lasts. And so right now, at the present time, four months into this pandemic, we're not able to say that an antibody response means someone is immune. Saying that there's no evidence in this area doesn't mean that there's no immunity. It just means that these studies haven't been done yet.”
Ryan, for his part, said, “empirically we assume some level of protection from having had an infection. If you are a healthy individual, that fully clears the virus from your system, you recover, you develop antibodies. In most cases, you would expect those antibodies to provide you with protection for a period of time. The question is, it is unknown what that period of time is, and it is unknown what the extent of protection is and that needs to be studied.”
According to the WHO’s latest COVID-19 situation report, there are 2,804,796 confirmed cases globally, and 193,710 deaths.
