While the true toll of the pandemic last year may have been far higher — in part the result of data lags, missed cases, and incomplete reporting — the figure serves as a stark reminder of the raging pandemic that continues to claim millions of lives around the world, even as vaccinations have arrested the worst of the disease’s spread in the U.S. To date, a total of nearly 600,000 deaths have been reported in the U.S.

Worldwide, an average of more than 9,000 deaths from COVID-19 are still being confirmed daily. That rate of newly reported deaths has steadily declined from its last peak in April, but remains higher than record daily tolls from November of last year.

Cases, hospitalizations, and deaths are also climbing inside many countries. The World Health Organization warned this week that the Western Pacific region, which encompasses Asia, had again recorded its highest incidence of deaths to date.

“Increasingly, we see a two-track pandemic. Many countries still face an extremely dangerous situation, while some of those with the highest vaccination rates are starting to talk about ending restrictions,” World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters on Monday.

Public health officials have repeatedly warned world leaders against prematurely easing COVID-19 restrictions over the past weeks, citing concerns over a surge in new fast-spreading strains of the virus. The White House also raised concerns Tuesday over recent data suggesting vaccines were significantly less effective after one dose against the B.1.617.2 variant first identified in India. President Biden’s chief medical adviser, Dr. Anthony Fauci, urged Americans to “make sure you get that second dose.”

Dubbed the “Delta” variant by the World Health Organization, that mutation now appears to be driving outbreaks of cases in several countries around the world, even in the United Kingdom where 6 in 10 residents have at least one shot of a COVID-19 vaccine. Health officials say there’s evidence that being fully vaccinated still offers protection against all known variants.

In the U.S., B.1.617.2 has already been spotted by labs in 49 states. “Nowcast” projections published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate it could make up 6.1% of circulating virus in the country.

The somber milestone also comes as President Biden is touting a “historic” purchase of 500 million doses in Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine to donate to low- and middle-income countries and the African Union through 2022, beyond the 80 million doses he had pledged to share by June.

“It’s also in America’s self-interest. As long as the virus rages elsewhere, there is a risk of new mutations that could threaten our people,” Mr. Biden said Thursday in announcing the purchase.

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The worst could be still to come in the Covid-19 pandemic, the World Health Organization (WHO) has warned, six months on from when the outbreak began.

WHO head Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the virus would infect many more people if governments did not start to implement the right policies.

His message remained “Test, Trace, Isolate and Quarantine”, he said.

More than 10m cases have been recorded worldwide since coronavirus emerged in China late last year.

The number of patients who died is now above 500,000. Half the world’s cases have been in the US and Europe but Covid-19 is rapidly growing in the Americas.

The virus is also affecting South Asia and Africa, where it is not expected to peak until the end of July.

• Where are coronavirus cases rising and falling?
• Is Trump right to say the US does ‘the greatest testing’?

Dr. Tedros told a virtual briefing on Monday: “We all want this to be over. We all want to get on with our lives. But the hard reality is this is not even close to being over.

“Although many countries have made some progress, globally the pandemic is actually speeding up.”

“With 10 million cases now and half a million deaths, unless we address the problems we’ve already identified at WHO, the lack of national unity and lack of global solidarity and the divided world which is actually helping the virus to spread… the worst is yet to come,” he said.

“I’m sorry to say that, but with this kind of environment and conditions we fear the worst.”

He also urged more governments to follow the examples of Germany, South Korea, and Japan, which kept their outbreak in check through policies that included rigorous testing and tracing.

What are the worst-affected countries?

The US has reported more than 2.5 million cases and about 126,000 deaths with Covid-19 so far – more than any other nation.

US states that emerged from lockdown in recent weeks – notably in the south – have been reporting sharp increases in new infections in recent weeks.

The spike has led officials in Texas, Florida, and other states to tighten restrictions on business again.

The country with the second-highest number of recorded cases is Brazil, with a total of 1.3 million, and deaths in excess of 57,000.

On Monday a state of emergency was declared in the capital Brasilia, following a surge there.

Like most Brazilian governors and mayors, the local authorities in Brasilia eased social distancing restrictions earlier this month and allowed shops to reopen

In the UK – the country with the greatest number of deaths in Western Europe – the mayor of Leicester said pubs and restaurants might stay closed for two more weeks due to a spike in cases.

Restrictions in the rest of England are due to be eased at the weekend, with pubs, restaurants, hairdressers, and hotels allowed to reopen.

Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-53227219

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YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki appeared on CNN’s far-left “Reliable Sources” on Sunday to discuss what the platform is doing to combat misinformation during the coronavirus pandemic. Wojcicki said YouTube would remove any videos that provide “problematic” information related to COVID-19.

TRUMP ANNOUNCES US WILL HALT FUNDING TO WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION OVER CORONAVIRUS RESPONSE

“Anything that is medically unsubstantiated, so people saying, like, ‘Take Vitamin C… take turmeric, those cure you,’ those are examples of things that would be a violation of our policy. Um, anything that would go against World Health Organization recommendations would be a violation of our policy,” Wojcicki said.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus is facing scrutiny — including calls for his resignation — over what the White House calls the organization’s “mismanagement” of the crisis — and allegations that it failed to demand accurate data from China regarding the pandemic’s origins in Wuhan.

NEW YORK TIMES ACCUSED OF ‘CARRYING WATER’ FOR WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION

Trump also claimed last week that the WHO put “political correctness over lifesaving measures” and said the organization made the “disastrous” decision to oppose travel restrictions on China like the one Trump imposed in late January.

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Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (left), the director-general of the World Health Organization, shakes hands with Chinese President Xi Jinping before a meeting at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Jan. 28. NAOHIKO HATTA – POOL/GETTY IMAGES

hile the novel coronavirus is changing the world, China is trying to do the same. Already a serious strategic rival of the United States with considerable international clout, it’s now moving into a new field—health.

After initial denials and cover-ups, China successfully contained the COVID-19 outbreak—but not before it had exported many cases to the rest of the world. Today, despite the falsehoods it initially passed on, which played a critical role in delaying global response, it’s trying to leverage its reputed success story into a stronger position on international health bodies.

Most critically, Beijing succeeded from the start in steering the World Health Organization (WHO), which both receives funding from China and is dependent on the regime of the Communist Party on many levels. Its international experts didn’t get access to the country until Director-General Tedros Adhanom visited President Xi Jinping at the end of January. Before then, WHO was uncritically repeating information from the Chinese authorities, ignoring warnings from Taiwanese doctors—unrepresented in WHO, which is a United Nations body—and reluctant to declare a “public health emergency of international concern,” denying after a meeting Jan. 22 that there was any need to do so.

After the Beijing visit, though, WHO said in a statement that it appreciated “especially the commitment from top leadership, and the transparency they have demonstrated.” Only after the meeting did it declared, on Jan. 30, a public health emergency of international concern. And after China reported only a few new cases each day, WHO declared the coronavirus a pandemic March 11—even though it had spread globally weeks before.

[Mapping the Coronavirus Outbreak: Get daily updates on the pandemic and learn how it’s affecting countries around the world.]

WHO was keen to broadcast Beijing’s message. “In the face of a previously unknown virus, China has rolled out perhaps the most ambitious, agile and aggressive disease containment effort in history,” WHO experts said in their February report on the mission to China. The country had gained “invaluable time for the response” in an “all-of-government and all-of society approach” that has averted or delayed hundreds of thousands of cases, protecting the global community and “creating a stronger first line of defense against international spread.”

China’s “uncompromising and rigorous use of non-pharmaceutical measures” provides vital lessons for the global response, the WHO report said. Beijing’s strategy “demonstrated that containment can be adapted and successfully operationalized in a wide range of settings.” However, while recommending China’s epidemic control policy to the world, WHO neglected the negative externalities—from economic damage to the failure to treat many non-coronavirus patients, psychological woes, and human rights costs.

It’s not surprising that China’s containment strategy was effective, said Richard Neher, virologist at the University of Basel. “The big lockdown, centralized quarantine, and contact tracing for sure accelerated the decline,” Neher said. Lawrence O. Gostin, director of the WHO Collaborating Center on National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University, points to “major human rights” concerns with the lockdown techniques pioneered in China and now—to a different degree—adopted in many nations. Gostin recommends standard public health measures like testing, treatment, contact tracing, and isolation or quarantine “as scientifically justified.”

While the rising number of cases elsewhere shows that China isn’t alone in failing in the initial stages of an outbreak, the full story of the Chinese loss will probably never be known—and certainly not recognized by WHO or other bodies.

One reason is that official data from China is often highly dubious—which can lead to ill-advised health policies in other countries, since studies based on information from China are the first used to understand COVID-19. Countless cases of people dying at home in Wuhan—some being described in social media posts—will probably never go into the statistics. And while a report by Caixin on the Chinese province of Heilongjiang said that a considerable percentage of asymptomatic cases has not been reported—which amounts to about 50 percent more known infections in China, according to a South China Morning Post report on classified government data—WHO takes numbers reported by Beijing at face value.

“I thought the greatest success of the Chinese party-state was in getting the WHO to focus on the positive sides of China’s responses and ignore the negative sides of the responses,” said Steve Tsang, director of the China Institute at the SOAS University of London. “With the WHO presenting China’s responses in a positive light, the Chinese government is able to make its propaganda campaign to ignore its earlier mistakes appear credible and to ignore the human, societal, and economic costs of its responses.”

Indeed, WHO closes its eyes to such problems. “China reported and isolated ALL individuals with laboratory-confirmed COVID-19,” Christian Lindmeier, a WHO spokesperson, said in mid-March. However, Chinese authorities only in the beginning of April started to make current numbers of asymptomatic cases with lab-confirmed infections public—which also are included in the WHO case definition for COVID-19. “Every country has its own self-reporting processes”, Lindmeier said. WHO epidemiologist Bruce Aylward, who headed the visit, said in an interview that China was not hiding anything. When asked how many people have been put in quarantine, isolation, or residential restriction, Lindmeier referred to numbers from China’s National Health Commission—which are much smaller than the numbers calculated by the New York Times. “WHO works with these data,” he said.

Yet it is unclear whether the WHO experts who traveled to China sufficiently understood the situation on the ground. For example, based on numbers from the South China province of Guangdong, WHO argued that undetected cases are rare. However, a screening program for COVID-19 only included patients seen at fever clinics; most of them probably showed at least a fever. In Germany, most of the people who tested positive did not show a fever. It is easily possible that there has been a substantial number of undetected cases, Neher said, which is the “big unknown” in calculations of the death rate.

WHO also left many questions open about how exactly public engagement was managed in its report. Chinese people have reacted “with courage and conviction,” it says; they have “accepted and adhered to the starkest of containment measures.” While this is probably true for many, others were likely motivated by a statement of the Supreme People’s Court: People carrying the virus who don’t follow quarantine restrictions “face jail terms ranging from three to 10 years if the consequence is not serious,” it says. Otherwise, they could face a life sentence or death.

“The community has largely accepted the prevention and control measures and is fully participating in the management of self-isolation and enhancement of public compliance,” the WHO report says. In China, no measures have been implemented that could not also be used elsewhere, Aylward claimed in an interview. Apparently, the WHO mission didn’t have the chance to speak with people with opposing views. Many Chinese people told him that they all have been attacked together and need to react in a united fashion, Aylward said.

The very uniformity of this narrative should have been a wake-up call, said Mareike Ohlberg from the Berlin-based Mercator Institute for China Studies. Indeed, the whole trip of both foreign and national experts seems to have been organized along Potemkin-esque lines for a team where most of its international members lacked linguistic skills and familiarity with China. “We really didn’t have much interaction until after all the site visits,” said Clifford Lane, a deputy director at the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a member of the delegation. It was his first trip to China, he told Science. “I was really surprised with how modern the cities were.”

Ohlberg said the statements of the WHO have clearly been heavily influenced by the Chinese Communist Party. She says she was surprised that, from the start, many experts uncritically repeated information from Beijing and “preached confidence in the WHO and the Chinese government.” The WHO report rightly emphasized the heroic commitment of the population of Wuhan. “But it’s important that the WHO does not degrade itself to an instrument of the Chinese government—which does not want to make transparent how the population suffered,” she said.

Osman Dar, global health expert at Public Health England and the Royal Institute of International Affairs, said that China is no different from other countries that seek to exert influence. WHO had evolved out of colonial-era international sanitary conferences convened by the European powers and expansionist U.S. policy, he said. Since WHO was controlled and largely influenced by the national interests of Western powers before, in the past 20 years, countries like China “have started to have more influence in the global health space.”

Beijing’s say is growing not only at WHO, but also in the health policies of more and more countries. This also is an important area in China’s Belt and Road Initiative and its activities in African countries. It may be doubted whether Beijing always acts in the best interests of its partners. “Chinese health aid allocation is poorly related to direct health needs of African countries,” French researchers last year concluded.

The same is true for the current outbreak, which is politically important, said Tankred Stöbe, former president of MSF (Doctors Without Borders) Germany and a former member of the International Board of MSF International. In February, he traveled to Southeast Asia (SEA) as a COVID-19 emergency coordinator for Doctors Without Borders. Countries like Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand “cannot escape the influence of China,” he said. “I know about meetings where representatives of China have said: Dear friends in Southeast Asia, we’re interested in continuing good cooperation. It is clear for us that you must let your borders open—otherwise we would have to rethink our friendship.” The countries “cannot refuse,” Stöbe said. Countries like Cambodia and Pakistan  kept accepting flights from China during the outbreak.

For political reasons, “Vietnam can’t close its border with China,” physician Rafi Kot told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. He founded several medical centers in the country. “The Chinese have put immense pressure on everyone: the Koreans, Vietnam, everyone,” he told the newspaper. “Asian countries cannot act as they want vis-a-vis China because it’s the big power in the neighborhood.” While Cambodia closed its borders to several Western countries in mid-March, it started military drills together with hundreds of Chinese soldiers, which concluded this Monday.

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In this Feb. 24, 2020, photo, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-gneral of the World Health Organization (WHO), addresses a press conference about the update on COVID-19 at the World Health Organization headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. Taiwan’s foreign ministry on Thursday, April 8, 2020, strongly protested accusations from the head of the World Health Organization that it condoned racist personal attacks on him that he alleged were coming from the self-governing island democracy. (Salvatore Di Nolfi/Keystone via AP) **FILE**

House Republican Conference Chair Liz Cheney said Thursday that the World Health Organization head “absolutely should go,” arguing that having a Chinese Communist Party “puppet” in charge is “costing lives around the world.”

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has come under heavy U.S. criticism for his response to the coronavirus pandemic, including from President Trump, who threatened Tuesday to cut off U.S. funding to the UN agency.

“[W]e’re in a situation where having somebody who is a puppet of the Chinese Communist Party running the WHO is costing lives around the world,” Ms. Cheney told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt in a transcript. “And in order for that organization to play anywhere near the role we need it to play, it needs a new director, certainly.”

Mr. Tedros, an Ethiopian microbiologist who holds a doctorate in community health, pushed back Wednesday against those “politicizing this virus,” saying, “If you don’t want any more body bags, then you refrain from politicizing it.”

Sen. Martha McSally, Arizona Republican, called last week for Mr. Tedros to resign, while Sen. Rick Scott, Florida Republican, said Congress should investigate when it returns the WHO response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Critics have cited WHO’s Jan. 14 statement saying that initial investigations “conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission,” despite evidence from Taiwanese researchers indicating otherwise.

Ms. Cheney cited WHO’s pushback on travel bans after Mr. Trump imposed travel restrictions on China in late January.

Source: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/apr/9/liz-cheney-slams-whos-tedros-adhanom-ghebreyesus-c/

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KEY POINTS

• Four people have died from the virus in Iran and 18 cases have been confirmed
• Most cases in Iran were linked to the city of Qom, where the Chinese are building a solar power plant
• Lebanon reported its first case of the virus — a woman returning from Qom

Health authorities in Iran said on Friday that two elderly people died from the coronavirus that first emerged in China, while a total of 13 new cases have been confirmed in the Islamic Republic.

On the whole, four people have died from the virus in Iran and 18 cases have been confirmed.

Kianoush Jahanpour, a spokesman for the health ministry, said the 13 new cases were all linked to the city of Qom which is located about 80 miles south of the capital Teheran. Jahanpour said four of the infected people have been hospitalized in Teheran, and two were under care in the northern province of Gilan.

Minoo Mohrez, an Iranian health ministry official, speculated the virus might have originated in “Chinese workers who work in Qom and traveled to China.” A Chinese company has been constructing a solar power plant in Qom.

Iranian authorities have closed all schools and Shiite seminaries in Qom. Health officials have also called for the suspension of all religious assemblies in the city.

Mohrez further said that the virus may have spread to other parts of Iran.

“Based on existing reports, the spread of the coronavirus started in Qom and with [respect] to people’s travels [the virus] has now reached several cities in the country, including Tehran, Babol, Arak, Isfahan, Rasht, and other cities. And it is possible that it exists in all cities in Iran.”

But no clear link has yet been established between virus infections in Iran and the Chinese city of Wuhan, where the epidemic is believed to have originated.

The World Health Organization called the coronavirus outbreak in Iran “very worrisome.” “The cases that we see in the rest of the world, although the numbers are small, but not linked to Wuhan or China, it’s very worrisome,” said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of WHO. “These dots are actually very concerning.”

Iran said it recently evacuated 60 Iranian students from Wuhan, China, the epicenter of the virus epidemic. The students were quarantined upon their return but discharged after 14 days without any reports of infection.

Iran has suspended all passenger flights to and from China, permitting only cargo flights, but has not yet prohibited its citizens from traveling to China.

Iran’s civil aviation spokesman Reza Jafarzadeh said “cargo flights, if necessary, are under supervision, and controls imposed by the health ministry are [being] carried out.”

Dr. Jaouad Mahjour, assistant director of emergency preparedness at WHO, said Iran’s health care system has the “basic capacity” to detect and contain the coronavirus.

Lebanon has also reported its first case of the virus. Health Minister Hamad Hassan said on Friday the patient is a 45-year-old woman who arrived in Beirut on Thursday on a flight from Qom in Iran.

He added that the woman was in “good health” and that the ministry is investigating two other people suspected of infection. All three were quarantined at the Rafik Hariri government hospital in Beirut.

Turkey’s Health Minister Fahrettin Koca said officials have begun to screen travelers coming from Iran at the borders and banning entry to anyone who show signs of the illness. Koca also said Iranians who have visited Qom in the past 14 days will be denied entry into Turkey,

Qom is a very important city for Shiite Muslims, attracting millions of visitors, pilgrims and students every year from Iran, Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan, Azerbaijan and other countries with significant Shiite populations.

Ali Tabatabaei, a journalist in Qom, said local authorities “have been taking the infection seriously and up till now three hospitals have been allocated to take in patients affected by the virus. Leave for all physicians who work for the government has been canceled and all hospitals are on red alert.”

Iraq, which has not yet reported any cases of the virus, has suspended visas on arrival for Iranian passport holders and banned direct flights between the two nations.

Iraq’s most prominent Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, called on the government to prepare for the virus during his weekly sermon on Friday. “The level of preparations should match the level of the threat,” he said.

The United Arab Emirates reported two new cases of the virus on Friday, raising its total count of infections to 11.

UAE’s health ministry said the two new cases comprised a 34-year-old Filipino and a 39-year-old Bangladeshi national both of whom had contact with a Chinese citizen who had already been diagnosed with the virus. Most of the other confirmed cases were Chinese citizens.

Also on Friday, Israel reported its first case of the virus — one of 11 Israelis who flew home after being quarantined on a cruise ship in Japan has tested positive. All were being held under quarantine at the Sheba Hospital outside Tel Aviv.

Another four Israelis in Japan were hospitalized after testing positive for the coronavirus.

Israel has suspended all flights to and from China, and now requires Israelis returning from China, Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore or Thailand to be quarantined for two weeks.

Source: https://www.ibtimes.com/coronavirus-update-infections-have-now-spread-middle-east-2926684

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GENEVA – Experts meeting in emergency session at the World Health Organization will look at the spreading Coronavirus to see whether it constitutes a Public Health Emergency of International Concern and decide on recommendations needed to manage it.  The WHO has confirmed 440 cases of the disease, including 17 deaths.

Since the new coronavirus was detected in a fish market in Wuhan city, China three weeks ago, the previously unknown virus has moved with frightening speed internally and abroad.  Deaths have been reported in China, Thailand, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan.

The first case of the disease has been reported in the United States in a man who returned to the West Coast city of Seattle last week from Wuhan.  He is hospitalized in good condition, but the appearance of the case has put officials in the U.S. and other countries on heightened alert.

FILE – Medical staff carry a box as they walk at the Jinyintan hospital, where the patients with pneumonia caused by the new strain of coronavirus are being treated, in Wuhan, Hubei province, China, Jan. 10, 2020.

Many airports are screening travelers from China.  U.S. President Donald Trump, who was attending the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, has told media that he trusts the information coming out of China on coronavirus and that the situation was under control.

Nevertheless, the World Health Organization is urging countries to continue preparedness measures to protect themselves from the possibilities of a large-scale outbreak.

WHO spokesman Tarek Jasarevic says WHO experts and health officials in China are conducting investigations into the outbreak.

“Much remains to be understood about this novel coronavirus.  Not enough is known to draw definitive conclusions about how it is transmitted, clinical features of the disease, its severity, the extent to which it has spread or its source,” he said.

Based on previous experience with respiratory illness, Jasarevic says limited human to human transmission is likely occurring.  But he adds, this is not an airborne disease and people have to be in close contact to get infected.

He says WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has convened the emergency meeting because little is known about the coronavirus and expert advice is needed to calm nerves and to know what protective actions are required.

He notes a Public Health Emergency of International Public Concern has been declared only five times by the WHO.

Source: https://www.voanews.com/science-health/world-health-experts-assess-global-risk-deadly-china-virus

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A global measles crisis caused more than 140,000 deaths last year, with data showing the number of cases reported so far this year is three times higher than at the same stage in 2018.

Measles infected nearly 10 million people last year and killed 140,000, mostly children, as devastating outbreaks of the viral disease hit every region of the world, the World Health Organisation said on Thursday.

In figures described by its director-general as “an outrage”, the WHO said most of the 2018 measles deaths were in children under five years old who had not been vaccinated.

“The fact that any child dies from a vaccine-preventable disease like measles is frankly an outrage and a collective failure to protect the world’s most vulnerable children,” said the WHO’s director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

The picture for 2019 is even worse, the WHO said, with provisional data up to November showing a three-fold increase compared with the same period in 2018.

The United States has already reported its highest number of measles cases in 25 years in 2019, while Albania, the Czech Republic, Greece, and Great Britain lost their WHO “measles-free” status in 2018 after suffering large outbreaks.

An ongoing outbreak of measles in Samoa has infected more than 4,200 people and killed more than 60.

Globally, measles vaccination rates have stagnated for almost a decade, the WHO said.

It and the UNICEF children’s fund say that in 2018, around 86 percent of children got the first dose of measles vaccine through their country’s routine vaccination services, and fewer than 70 percent got the second dose recommended to fully protect them from measles infection.

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The World Health Organization (WHO) on Monday outlined a global plan for fighting influenza and trying to prevent or slow any worldwide outbreak of the viral disease, warning that the danger of a pandemic was “ever-present.”

“The question is not if we will have another pandemic, but when,” said WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in a statement on the WHO website. “We must be vigilant and prepared —  the cost of a major influenza outbreak will far outweigh the price of prevention.”

Among other things, Dr. Tedros warned of the risk that a new influenza virus could transmit from animals to humans to trigger such a pandemic.

“With the partnerships and country-specific work we have been doing over the years, the world is better prepared than ever before for the next big outbreak, but we are still not prepared enough,” he said. “This strategy aims to get us to that point.”

Read more: Do I have the flu or the common cold?

The WHO said there were an estimated 1 billion cases of flu each year, resulting in 290,000 to 650,000 respiratory deaths.

Strengthening national capacities

The United Nations agency recommends annual vaccinations to combat the disease, particularly for people working in health care and high-risk groups such as the old, the very young and those suffering from underlying illnesses.

The plan aims to build stronger national capacities to fight the disease, calling on countries to each have a special influenza program. It also wants to develop better tools for preventing, detecting, controlling and treating the disease and make these tools accessible for all countries. The anti-flu measures include vaccines and antiviral drugs.

Read more: WHO publishes list of 12 pathogens that pose greatest risk to human health

The world’s last flu pandemic was in 2009 and 2010 and was caused by the H1N1 virus. At least one in five people across the world is thought to have been infected, with a mortality rate of around 0.02 percent, amounting to 18,500 deaths in 214 countries.​​​​​​​

Source: https://www.dw.com/en/next-flu-pandemic-a-matter-of-when-not-if-says-who/a-47853367

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