The coronavirus pandemic might not be the “big one” that experts have long feared, a World Health Organization official warned Tuesday during the global health agency’s last virtual media briefing of the year.
Since the first reports of the novel coronavirus began circulating nearly a year ago, the WHO has repeatedly warned that the world must prepare for even deadlier pandemics in the future.
“This pandemic has been very severe,” WHO emergencies chief Mark Ryan said. “It has affected every corner of this planet. But this is not necessarily the big one.”
The coronavirus, he said, should serve as a “wake-up call.”
“These threats will continue,” he said. “One thing we need to take from this pandemic, with all of the tragedy and loss, is we need to get our act together. We need to honor those we’ve lost by getting better at what we do every day.”
After the novel coronavirus emerged in China late last year, 2020 is coming to an end amid the rollout of new coronavirus vaccines. Case numbers are rising in some places, public health experts are warning about a highly transmissible variant of the virus first detected in the United Kingdom in September and since documented in more than 20 countries.
While the variant does not appear to be more deadly or vaccine-resistant, it does transmit faster and is probably fueling outbreaks from England to South Africa.
On Tuesday, German health officials said they detected a case of the U.K. variant dating back as early as November. An elderly coronavirus patient who had the variant ultimately died of the virus. The patient’s daughter had returned from Britain in mid-November, and the man’s wife was also infected with COVID-19, the illness the novel coronavirus can cause, but she survived, Agence France-Presse reported.
Germany is one of several countries to temporarily bar travelers from the United Kingdom to prevent the variant’s spread. Much of England is under a lockdown.
India on Tuesday confirmed its first cases of the U.K. variant after finding it in six people who had recently arrived from Britain. Indian Civil Aviation Minister Hardeep Singh Puri told reporters Tuesday that the country probably would issue a temporary ban on flights from the United Kingdom as a result.
Countries across Europe, Asia and the Middle East have documented cases of the fast-spreading form of the virus. Canada on Saturday was the first to report it in North America. It is probably already circulating undetected in the United States, according to public health experts. The United States has the world’s highest count of coronavirus infections and fatalities.
As the number of dead continues to rise, Russia on Tuesday said that 80 percent of the excess deaths it documented in 2020 were probably linked to the novel coronavirus, a recount that would more than triple the country’s official figure.
Russia’s government reported more than 55,800 covid-19 deaths, but including the new data from excess deaths would raise the toll to more than 186,000 dead, according to the BBC. Russia’s statistics service, Rosstat, has documented 116,030 coronavirus-related deaths.
Russian Deputy Prime Minister Tatiana Golikova said Tuesday that 13.8 percent more people had died in the first 11 months of 2020 than in 2019, according to the BBC.
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