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The World Health Organization (WHO) warns of a spike in Covid-19 cases that need to be watched out for in winter. Given that in the past week, WHO said the Covid-19 virus had killed at least 50,000 people.
“This is not the situation we want,” said the Executive Director of the WHO Health Emergencies Program, Mike Ryan during a press conference at headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, as quoted from the website. detik.com, Sunday (20/9/2020).
The trend of increasing Covid-19 cases itself has even been seen by a number of WHO officials who continue to experience an increase. This is suddenly very worrying because several countries are struggling with the availability of ICU rooms and inpatients.
“This is not a situation that the northern hemisphere would like winter to enter. This is not a place that a developing country with stressful healthcare conditions want for nine months, ”said Ryan.
Therefore, Mike said there is a need for vigilance for several countries that are entering the winter. The reason is, this season more people tend to gather in one room and increase the risk of Covid-19 transmission. He also said that many activities needed to be done, such as protecting the opening of schools and protecting the most vulnerable people from severe illness and the risk of death.
On the other hand, the Regional Director of WHO Europe, Hans Kluge also gave a warning regarding the increase in the number of Covid-19 cases which have been surging again for weeks. In fact, some European countries have seen an increase of 10 percent or more in the last two weeks.
Concerns were expressed by US health officials because the Covid-19 outbreak could get worse as the country enters autumn and winter. Health officials have warned repeatedly that they are preparing to fight two nasty viruses circulating later this year as the Covid-19 outbreak enters flu season. Especially at the beginning of this month, Infectious Disease Expert, Anthony Fauci said that if it was approaching this fall, new cases every day were very high in the US.
“Once (the number of cases) is high, it will be difficult to reduce it,” he said.
He also said that the figure for the US would be hundreds of cases, thousands, but not 20, 30, 40 thousand cases a day. Meanwhile, WHO Technical Head for the Covid-19 pandemic, Maria Van Kerkhove noted that global health officials have hundreds of seroepidemiological studies examining the infection rates of the Covid-19 virus in different populations. In fact, the study shows that the majority of the population is vulnerable to the Covid-19 virus.
“The majority of the world’s population is susceptible to this virus infection. That means the virus is still long, “he said.
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