The World Health Organisation (WHO) has warned that 2021 will be a “far more deadly” year of COVID-19, as cases have begun to surge across the globe.
“We are on track for the second year of this pandemic to be far more deadly than the first,” organisation’s Director-General, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, according to news agency AFP.
The latest casualty was Japan. The country had further expanded a coronavirus state of emergency from six areas, including Tokyo, to nine, as Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga repeated his determination to hold the Olympics in just over two months. Japan has been struggling to slow infections ahead of the games. The three additions are Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido, where the Olympic marathon will be held, and Hiroshima and Okayama in western Japan. Infections are escalating extremely rapidly in populated areas, Suga said. “As new variants continue to spread, we judged that now is a very important time to stop the further spread of infections.”
Countries with the poorest results in addressing COVID-19 had uncoordinated approaches that devalued science, denied the potential impact of the pandemic, delayed comprehensive action, and allowed distrust to undermine efforts, a panel of independent experts said on Wednesday.
In a report released in Geneva, the panel, which reviewed the World Health Organisation’s response to the deadly coronavirus pandemic, also said the denial of scientific evidence was compounded by a failure of leadership to take responsibility or develop coherent strategies aimed at preventing community transmission.
“Countries with the poorest results in addressing COVID-19 had uncoordinated approaches that devalued science, denied the potential impact of the pandemic, delayed comprehensive action, and allowed distrust to undermine efforts,” it said. “Leaders who appeared sceptical or dismissive of emerging scientific evidence eroded public trust, cooperation and compliance with public health interventions,” the report said.
The panel’s review of a range of country responses up until March 2021 demonstrates that countries that recognised the threat of SARS-CoV-2 early, and were able to react comprehensively, fared much better than those that waited to see how the pandemic would develop. “The early-responding countries acted in a precautionary way to buy time, while getting information from other countries, particularly from Wuhan in China where the impact of the lockdown showed that stringent measures could effectively stop the outbreak,” it said.
The experts called on the global community to end the COVID-19 pandemic by immediately implementing a series of bold recommendations to redistribute, fund, and increase the availability of and manufacturing capacity for vaccines, and to apply proven public health measures urgently and consistently in every country.
The report demonstrates that the current system at both national and international levels was not adequate to protect people from COVID-19. The time it took from the reporting of a cluster of cases of pneumonia of unknown origin in mid-late December 2019 to a Public Health Emergency of International Concern being declared was too long.
February 2020 was also a lost month when many more countries could have taken steps to contain the spread of SARS-CoV-2 and forestall the global health, social, and economic catastrophe that continues its grip.
The panel said that the system as it stands now is clearly unfit to prevent another novel and highly infectious pathogen, which could emerge at any time, from developing into a pandemic.
The report also said the WHO should be granted guaranteed rights of access in countries to investigate emerging outbreaks.
The panel also recommended that national governments and the international community immediately adopt a package of reforms to transform the global pandemic preparedness and response system and prevent a future pandemic.