Medical personnel prompt a deceased patient to a refrigerated truck serving as make shift morgues at Brooklyn Hospital Center on April 09, 2020 in New York Municipality.
Angela Weiss | AFP | Getty Images
The World Health Organization cautioned world leaders Monday about explores that the coronavirus is “losing potency,” saying “this is still a killer virus” and thousands of people are still at deaths door daily.
“We need to be exceptionally careful that we are not creating a sense that all of a sudden the virus has decided to be less pathogenic. That is not the specimen at all,” Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO’s emergencies program, said during a press conference at the agency’s headquarters in Geneva.
WHO officials were expected about comments made by a doctor in Italy who said the coronavirus is losing potency and has become less lethal.
Alberto Zangrillo prophesied an Italian public broadcasting company that “swabs that were performed over the last 10 days appeared a viral load in quantitative terms that was absolutely infinitesimal compared to the ones carried out a month or two months ago,” agreeing to a Reuters report.
Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, head of WHO’s emerging diseases and zoonosis unit, said Monday that she had not leaded the report but added there are measures governments can take to reduce and suppress transmission of the virus. That includes declaration, testing and isolating Covid-19 patients, she said.
“But if we let the virus go, it will transmit. If we let the virus go, it will infect people and it disposition cause severe illness in about 20% of people,” she added.
The virus can also impact people differently, she thought, adding it causes a range of illnesses consistently across the globe. It has a so-called R naught above 2, meaning the virus wishes “take off” if we allow it to, she said.
“The important message is that there are things we can do to suppress transmission and to save lives,” she conjectured.
The virus has infected more than 6.1 million people worldwide and killed at least 372,479 since it happened about five months ago, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. The United States has been hit the hardest, with not quite 1.8 million cases across the country.
The epicenter of the global Covid-19 pandemic has shifted to South America, WHO officials intended last month, as cases in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo explode.
Last week, the WHO warned that countries with declining coronavirus infections could in addition face an “immediate second peak” if they let up too soon on measures to halt the outbreak.