With coronavirus cases alarmingly surging by 1.50 lakh in a day globally, the World Health Organisation (WHO) on Saturday warned that the Covid-19 pandemic is entering a “new and dangerous” phase with the virus outbreak accelerating across the countries which are in the spree of opening up of the economy.
Urging countries to remain extremely vigilant, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the pandemic is speeding up with the most number of cases reported in a day.
“The pandemic is accelerating. More than 150,000 new cases of COVID-19 were reported to WHO yesterday -- the most in a single day so far,” said Tedros at a press briefing at Geneva.
The coronavirus outbreak has wreaked havoc across the world killing at least 454,000 people and infected more than 8.5 million worldwide since the outbreak began in China late last year.
The WHO chief said people getting tired of lockdowns imposed to halt the spread of the disease and there was a need to open up to deal with economic damage but the “the virus is still spreading fast” and is “still deadly.”
He added that “strict and sustained implementation” of public health measures to curb the spread of the virus remains essential but also noted the difficulty of carrying out such efforts in refugee camps, where migrants face huge risks of being sickened by Covid-19.
The observation come as a tally from Johns Hopkins University shows there have been 8,520,761 confirmed cases of the coronavirus and 454,889 deaths from Covid-19. The total cases include 2,203,659 just from the United States, where the virus has claimed the lives of 118,519.