Declaring victory over COVID…not fair: WHO official on factors that can delay fight against pandemic

Even as we are on the victory path over the COVID pandemic, there are still issues that persist in some parts of the world, a World Health Organisation official said and further added, “Declaring victory for the whole world while some still suffer, that's not fair.”

This pandemic has uncovered so many inequities. The fact is if you are living in a society where you are marginalised for one thing, then you are likely to be marginalised for many things, and you are likely to be on the bad end of the COVID experience because of all of that marginalisation, said WHO Mike Ryan during an interview

If we are really going to go into the next possible threat of the pandemic with systems that are so unfair, with our health system completely distorted, … then we are going to make the same mistakes again and again, the WHO official added.

The health agency, earlier this week, said a dramatic drop in testing for Covid-19 has left the world blind to the virus's continuing rampage and its potentially dangerous mutations.

The UN health agency said that reported Covid cases and deaths had been dropping dramatically.

"Last week, just over 15 thousand deaths were reported to WHO -- the lowest weekly total since March 2020," WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters.

While this is "a very welcome trend," he warned that the declining numbers could also be a result of significant cuts in testing for the virus.

"This makes us increasingly blind to patterns of transmission and evolution," Tedros said.