The Emergency Committee of the International Sanitary Regulationsmeeting at the request of the World Health Organization (WHO) last Friday, January 27, has agreed to continue considering Covid-19 as a a public health emergency of international concern. In this way, it is ruled out for the moment to attenuate the level of alert at a global level due to the pandemic.
However, the committee will recognize that the pandemic may be approaching a tipping point, brought about by the vaccination progress in most countries, the proliferation of tests and the sequencing of variants to determine which are the most infections. However, they establish “without a doubt” that the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 it will remain a permanently entrenched pathogen in humans and animals from now on.
The committee criticizes that long-term public health actions have been “stuck” in some countries for reasons such as the hospital collapse from influenza and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) and burnout of healthcare professionals. “While elimination of this virus from human and animal reservoirs is highly unlikely, the mitigation of its devastating impact on morbidity and mortality is feasible and should continue to be a priority objective,” they insist.
[Los epidemiólogos piden quitar ya la mascarilla obligatoria en el transporte público]
For all these reasons, the IHR advises the World Health Organization (WHO) to develop a proposal for alternative mechanisms to maintain the “global and national” focus on coronavirus. It also proposes to institute an assessment regarding the regulatory implications for develop and license vaccines, diagnostics and therapies if this emergency comes to an end in the coming months.
In this sense, the director general of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesushas thanked the RSI for having “mitigated” the possible negative consequences of not considering the coronavirus as a public health emergency of international concern.
China denies the rebound
China’s Center for Disease Control (CDC) has assured that the country “has not experienced a significant rebound” in Covid-19 infections and hospital admissions despite free movement during the recently ended Lunar New Year holidays. “The current wave of the pandemic in China is coming to an end“, they come to say in a statement collected by the local press.
The same Chinese CDC stated last week that 80% of the country’s population, which is equivalent to about 1.2 billion people, have been infected in this wave. And though the official figures only speak of 72,000 deaths, many experts believe that the real numbers are much worse. Now, they say, the cases of Covid that have required hospital care have been reduced “by more than 90%” compared to the end of December.
In the world there are about 5 billion people who have the pattern complete primary school with one of the vaccines developed against Covid, which leaves out another 3,000 million. As for the reinforcements that have been essential to cope with waves of variants such as omicron, only about 2.5 billion doses have been administered.
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