Coronavirus accelerating rapidly, warns WHO

The World Health
Organisation on Tuesday warned that the COVID-19 pandemic is clearly
“accelerating”, but said it was still possible to “change the
trajectory” of the outbreak.

 According to AFP data, the global deaths have
crossed the 15,000 mark, with more than 3,41,000 infected worldwide. “The
pandemic is accelerating,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said,
according to reports. “It took 67 days from the beginning of the outbreak in
China in late December for the virus to infect the first 100,000 people worldwide.

In
comparison, it took 11 days for the second 100,000 cases and just four days for
the third 100,000 cases,” he said.

The number
of cases is believed to represent only a fraction of the true number of
infections, with many countries only testing the most severe cases in need of
hospitalisation.

“We are
not helpless bystanders. We can change the trajectory of this pandemic,”
Tedros said. He called for a mixed approach, which he likened to a football
match, after he and FIFA chief Gianni Infantino jointly launched a campaign
aimed at spreading the message of how to protect against infection “to
kick out coronavirus.”

Tedros
praised the great energy being put into research and development to find a
vaccine and of drugs to treat COVID-19. But, he said that “there is
currently no treatment that has been proven to be effective against
COVID-19,” and warned against the use of drugs not proven to work against
the disease.

India is
currently facing a surge of cases, with infections in excess of 450 now. Almost
all states are under a partial or complete lockdown, Maharashtra and Punjab
being the first ones to invoke whole-state curfews. Authorities, however, have
allayed fears of a community transmission. “So far there’s no confirmation of
any community transmission,” Health Ministry Joint Secretary Lav Agarwal said.

The Union
health ministry maintains that there was no evidence of community spead and
that these specific cases was still being looked into. The Indian Council of
Medical Research (ICMR) had insisted that India is currently at Stage 2 of the
coronavirus pandemic that has hit over 100 countries, hinting there is no
community transmission of the virus.

In stage 2,
the disease is transmitted locally from infected persons who are in close
contact or from those who travelled abroad. The source of the virus can be
traced easily, as opposed to community transmission stage 3—the phase in which
people are unable to identify how they got the virus. If community transmission
begins, it would be extremely difficult for governments to contain the rapid
spread of the disease.

At Stage 4,
the situation is similar to that of Wuhan, where the disease spread like
wildfire.