Corona virus will not be the final epidemic, the world must be ready: WHO President

Geneva, Ta. Sunday 27 December 2020

World Health Organization President Tedros Adhanom Ghebresius said Sunday that the corona virus crisis is not the ultimate epidemic and that all efforts to improve human health, climate change and animal welfare are futile.

Ghebresius criticized countries around the world for throwing money at the epidemic but not preparing to get rid of the next epidemic in a video message on the occasion of the first International Epidemic Preparedness Day on Sunday. The WHO director said it was time to learn from the Kovid-19 epidemic.

He said that for a very long time the world has been working on a cycle of terror and neglect. We throw money at a fury and when this is over we forget about it and do nothing to stop the oncoming. This is dangerously short-sighted and difficult to understand.

The first annual report of the Global Preparation Monitoring Board on Health Readiness for Health Preparations was published in September 2019. The outbreak of the corona virus spread around the world a few months later, when the report said the world was not ready for a potentially devastating epidemic. "History tells us that this will not be the final epidemic and the epidemic is a fact of life," Tedros said.

The epidemic has highlighted the intimate relationship between human, animal and earth health. Any attempt to optimize human health is ignored unless it addresses the important interface between humans and animals and makes the potential risk to climate change make our planet less livable.

The corona virus, which hit China in December last year, has killed 17,64,621 people so far and 8,07,17,733 cases, according to official sources compiled by AFP. “Our world has turned upside down in the last 12 months,” Tedros said. The epidemic has had an impact on societies and economies.