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The World Health Organization declared the novel coronavirus a pandemic Wednesday in response to both the growing number and severity of cases and “alarming levels of inaction” by some countries.
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When asked which specific countries needed to do more to address the threat, the director-general deferred to the executive director, who said, “You know who you are.”
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He continued to say that different countries lag in different areas, including testing and surveillance, and communication.
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WHO officials emphasized that all countries need to be regularly asking themselves, “Are we doing enough?” and taking action.
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When World Health Organization director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus announced Wednesday that his organization was officially declaring the novel coronavirus a pandemic, he noted that one reason for the decision was complacency.
Associated Press
“WHO has been assessing this outbreak around the clock, and we’re deeply concerned both by the alarming levels of spread and severity, and by the alarming levels of inaction,” he said.
Later, when asked by a Financial Times reporter if he could specify which countries need to do more to combat the threat, WHO’s executive director, Dr. Michael J. Ryan, stepped in.
“You know who you are,” he said, adding that his organization doesn’t call out individual member countries in public, but rather works with them “constructively” on measures they believe aren’t aggressive or comprehensive enough.
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WHO wants to see improvements in testing and surveillance
Ryan detail areas the WHO would like to see improvements in, including diagnostic and testing capacities. Countries limiting tests to people who meet certain criteria like being fully symptomatic, over a certain age, or having recently traveled to countries like China “isn’t the way forward in this epidemic,” he said.
“There are countries who have not updated their surveillance regimes to be adequately up to date with the current threats,” he said. “So surveillance systems have to improve in terms of case finding and isolation.”
The US, for one, lags behind other countries in testing and is now struggling to acquire enough materials to run the tests, Business Insider previously reported.
Some countries also lag in their efforts to stop infections in healthcare settings, leading to healthcare professionals getting sick. “We must protect our frontline hospital workers,” Ryan said.
Other countries “have been too willing to give up on contact tracing at a very early stage of the fight against the epidemic,” Ryan said. Contact tracing involves identifying and following up with people who may have come into contact with an infected person.
Earlier, he emphasized that the strategy is an inexpensive and “very basic public health intervention” compared to broad measures like social distancing, which is more burdensome and doesn’t work if there’s no cultural buy-in.
“When people move towards broader-based social distancing measures,” he said, “it effectively accepts that the chains of transmission are no longer visible.”
Contact tracing, by contrast, “does involve interrupting the lives of a small proportion of the population in terms of quarantine, of contacts, isolation of cases, and that’s a very tough on those individual families,” he said. “But please tell me if that’s less or more expensive than social distancing measures [that involve] locking down all areas, canceling all sporting events, canceling all religious events, closing schools.”
Flavio Lo Scalzo/Reuters
Epidemics are a ‘stress test for the system’
Ryan pointed out that a key problem for some countries is communication between government agencies, as well as between a country’s leadership and its citizens.
“Some countries have not been communicating well with their populations and creating some confusion in the minds of the population, and … trust between governments and their citizens really does need to come to the center,” he said.
Ultimately, Ryan said, all countries can do better, as epidemics are “a stress test for the system,” stressing governance, trust between the government and citizens, the hospital system, the public health systems, and the economic systems.
“The issue is how much resilience is built into those systems,” Ryan said. “And I’m frankly, well, l have to say to you that, in many cases, what we’re witnessing across society is a lack of resilience.”
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