14, September 2022
End of Covid pandemic in sight: WHO 0
The number of newly reported Covid-19 cases has dropped dramatically, the World Health Organization said Wednesday, urging the world to seize the opportunity to end the pandemic.
Newly reported cases of the disease, which has killed millions since being identified in late 2019, last week fell to the lowest level since March 2020, said WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
“We have never been in a better position to end the pandemic,” he told reporters. “We are not there yet, but the end is in sight.”
But the world needed to step up to “seize this opportunity”, he added.
“If we don’t take this opportunity now, we run the risk of more variants, more deaths, more disruption, and more uncertainty.”
According to WHO’s latest epidemiological report on Covid-19, the number of reported cases fell 12 percent to 4.2 million during the week ending September 4, compared to a week earlier.
‘Underestimate’
But the agency has warned that the dropping number of reported cases is deceptive, since many countries have cut back on testing and may not be detecting the less serious cases.
“The number of cases that are being reported to WHO we know are an underestimate,” Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO technical lead on Covid, told reporters.
“We feel that far more cases are actually circulating than are being reported to us,” she said, cautioning that the virus “is circulating at a very intense level around the world at the present time.”
Since the start of the pandemic, WHO has tallied more than 600 million cases, and some 6.4 million deaths, although both those numbers are also believed to be serious undercounts.
A WHO study published in May based on excess mortality seen in various countries during the pandemic estimated that up to 17 million people may have died from Covid in 2020 and 2021.
Van Kerkhove noted that going forward there will likely be “future waves of infection, potentially at different time points throughout the world, caused by different sub-variants of Omicron or even different variants of concern.”
But, she added, “those future waves of infection do not need to translate into future waves of death.”
‘Seize this opportunity’
In a bid to help countries to do what is needed to rein in the virus, the WHO on Wednesday published six policy briefs.
Among the recommendations, the WHO is urging countries to invest in vaccinating 100 percent of the most at-risk groups, including health workers and the elderly, and to keep up testing and sequencing for the virus.
“These policy briefs are an urgent call for governments to take a hard look at their policies, and strengthen them for Covid-19 and future pathogens with pandemic potential,” Tedros said.
“We can end this pandemic together, but only if all countries, manufacturers, communities and individuals step up and seize this opportunity.”
WHO emergencies director Michael Ryan agreed.
“Even as the pandemic wanes, and as the number of cases may drop, we are going to have to maintain high levels of vigilance,” he told reporters.
“We still have a highly mutable, evolving virus that has shown us time and time again over two and a half years how it can adapt, how it can change.”
Source: AFP
24, September 2022
Southern Cameroons Crisis: Hospital Administrator, two nurses arrested for treating ‘Amba’ fighters 0
The administrator of Banso Baptist Hospital (BBH) Jean Sama and two nurses, Teyeah Relindis (a scrub nurse) and Teba Carine, an advanced practice nursing assistant (APNA) are currently being held by elements of the Cameroon government military deployed to Kumbo for treating people considered as enemies of the state.
A sister publication Cameroon News Agency reported that the three were taken by the Francophone soldiers on September 22nd to an undisclosed location.
They are accused of treating wounded separatist fighters and it is not yet clear whether they are safe and in good physical conditions.
On September 4, separatist fighters who were receiving treatment in the hospital were dragged out of the wards and shot in front of the same hospital:
“Amba says we are working with the military and the military says we are working with Amba. What have we done? This is sad” a source quoted by Cameroon News Agency lamented.
Elsewhere in the report, CAN also revealed that last Saturday, drugs which left BBH for the Ndu Baptist Health Center were seized by soldiers loyal to the Biya regime in Yaoundé.
The BBH is a hospital of the Cameroon Baptist Convention (CBC) which is a church and is a non-partisan, non-political organization that offers medical care to everyone as an expression of Christian love.
Wounded Cameroon army soldiers have also been treated (and continue to be treated) at BBH and all other Baptist health facilities operating in the embattled region:
BBH staffs are planning to go on strike if the hospital administrator and nurses are not released. The repercussions for this could be catastrophic as BBH and its satellite health centers – are the lifeline for people with terminal conditions such as HIV, cancer or diabetes and a strike would affect them seriously.
By Fon Lawrence in Bamenda with files from Cameroon News Agency