Geneva: In a media briefing, speaking on the surge in coronavirus cases globally, the WHO Tedros cautioned the gathering saying ” we cannot pretend it’s not there”. In a tweet on 17th August, Tedros wrote-“Learning to live with #COVID19 does not mean we pretend it’s not there. It means we use the tools we have to protect ourselves, and protect others”
“In the past week, 15,000 people around the world lost their lives to COVID-19. And in just 4 weeks, the COVID-related fatalities increased by 35%. “We cannot live with 15,000 deaths a week. We cannot live with mounting hospitalizations and deaths. We cannot live with inequitable access to vaccines and other tools,” WHO director-general Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said.
He highlighted that Omicron remains a dominant variant, with BA.5 subvariant presenting more than 90 per cent of sequences shared in the last month.
In the same briefing, Tedros also shared statistics on Monkeypox that indicated a 20 per cent increase over the week. More than 35,000 cases of Monkeypox have been reported by WHO across 92 countries and territories while the death toll stood at 12. Majorly cases are reported from Europe and America among men who have sex with men.