EFE.- The director of Health Emergencies of the World Health Organization (WHO), Mike Ryan, stressed today that despite the fact that more than a hundred countries have already started vaccinations, we must continue community prevention measures or new waves of Covid-19 they could come.
“It is not the time to relax with the measures, if we do we run the risk of having a new wave of cases“, Said Ryan, after learning that in the past week the number of global infections rose 7%, after six weeks of declines.
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The Irish expert insisted that the fight against Covid-19 now has three fundamental pillars –individual prevention measures, public health surveillance Y vaccinations- and that only if all three work together “can we make confinements a thing of the past.”
“Failing one of them, we will return to large-scale social measures,” warned Ryan at the weekly meeting of experts from the WHO with Internet users through social networks.
“I understand that we are all tired and fed up, but control is in our hands, we approach the light at the end of the tunnel,” stressed the head of emergencies of the WHO.
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Ryan explained that some 115 countries have started vaccinations and some 265 million doses have been administered worldwide, although the distribution is still uneven, and 80% of them have been used in only ten countries (including the US, China or the United Kingdom, which lead the absolute figures of immunizations).
The expert also recalled and celebrated as great news in the fight against Covid-19 the beginning of the distribution of vaccines through the solidarity network COVAX, which since last week has already sent some 10 million doses to a dozen countries, including Colombia, Ghana, Ivory Coast and South Korea.
The person in charge of the technical unit against Covid-19 from WHO, Maria Van Kerkhove, mentioned in the same virtual meeting the concern generated by new variants of the coronavirus (one of them, the British one, is already present in more than a hundred countries) in the fight against pandemic.
However, the American stressed that for now it has been proven that the usual prevention measures (avoiding crowded places, use of face masks, hand hygiene) also work against these new variants, found first in patients from the UK, South Africa and Brazil.
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