COVID-19 Update from WHO

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO), holds a virtual briefing on the COVID-19 pandemic in Geneva on 15 April 2020~***UN Photo by Eskinder Debebe***

A day after the World Health Assembly adopted a landmark resolution on COVID-19, the Head of the World Health Organization told the media in Geneva that “the resolution sets out a clear roadmap of the critical activities and actions that must be taken to sustain and accelerate the response at the national and international levels.”

The resolution also “captures the comprehensive whole of government and whole of society approach we have been calling for since the beginning of the outbreak. If implemented, this would ensure a more coherent, coordinated and fairer response that saves both lives and livelihoods,” said Tedros.

WHO’s Director-General also said “COVID-19 is not the only challenge the world is facing. The climate crisis is causing increasingly strong storms, abnormal weather patterns and catastrophic shocks. Super cyclone Amphan is one of the biggest in years and is currently bearing down on Bangladesh and India. Our thoughts are with those affected and we recognize that like with COVID-19 there is a serious threat to life, particularly the poorest and most marginalized communities.”

On the use of malaria drugs hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine in treating the COVID-19 patients, the Executive Director of WHO’s Health Emergencies Programme Michael Ryan said the drugs have yet to be “found to be effective in the treatment of COVID-19 or in the prophylaxis against the coming down with the disease.”

“In fact,” Ryan said, “warnings have been issued by many authorities regarding the potential side effects of the drug. And many countries have limited it’s use to that of clinical trials, or during clinical trials are under the supervision of clinicians in a hospital setting.”

Speaking on the global efforts to find a working vaccine for coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 which is causing COVID-19, the Ryan said “There are no shortcuts here” and that “it’s really, really important that we, when we say we wish to go faster, we wish to be as efficient as possible, but still complete every step that’s necessary in delivering a safe and efficacious vaccine.”

“We need to track the infection, the virus itself, as it spreads around the world. We need to track its transmission dynamics to ensure that we understand how it’s transmitting, where it’s transmitting,” Ryan explained. “And we also have to track the clinical syndrome to be able to check whether any changes in the virus are resulting in any differences in the clinical attack rate or clinical fatality or clinical syndromes that are presenting,” he added~WHO