‘Covid-19 wake-up call’: WHO warns future pandemics to be far deadlier
Japan and Australia on Tuesday reported their first cases of a mutant of the virus originally found in South Africa, while Pakistan joined countries detecting the strain from Britain.
Pandemics far deadlier than Covid-19 are likely in future, warned the World Health Organization (WHO), as more countries detected new strains of the deadly coronavirus.
“This is a wake-up call,” WHO emergencies chief Michael Ryan told reporters. “This pandemic... has spread around the world extremely quickly and it has affected every corner of this planet, but this is not necessarily the big one. We need to get ready for something that may even be more severe in the future.”
Japan and Australia on Tuesday reported their first cases of a mutant of the virus originally found in South Africa, while Pakistan joined countries detecting the strain from Britain. UAE reported cases of a new strain, without specifying its origin. The UK variant has been in Germany since November, health officials there said on Tuesday, after detecting it in a patient who died in the north of the country.
Surging cases forced Rio de Janeiro - one of Brazil’s worst-hit cities - to block access to beaches on December 31 to prevent large crowds from celebrating New Year’s Eve. Officials in the Thai capital of Bangkok announced new restrictions, including the closure of some entertainment facilities during the New Year’s holiday, as infections continued to rise following a recent coronavirus outbreak. South Africa banned alcohol sales and made masks mandatory in public from Tuesday after a surge in cases.
Russia has said that its Covid-19 death toll was more than thrice the number reported previously, making it the country with the third-highest fatalities. The Rosstat statistics agency said the deaths recorded between January and November had risen by 229,700 compared to the previous year. “More than 81% of this increase in mortality over this period is due to Covid-19,” said deputy PM Tatiana Golikova, meaning that over 186,000 Russians have died from the coronavirus disease.
The UK reported a record 53,135 new cases on Tuesday. More people are now hospitalised with Covid-19 in England than at the first peak of the outbreak in the spring.
Belarus and Argentina began their vaccinations with shots of Russia’s Sputnik V, while Iran began the first phase of human clinical trials of a locally developed vaccine. The US on Tuesday began vaccinating its troops stationed in South Korea, which reported its worst daily death toll of 40 from the virus. US vice-president-elect Kamala Harris received the vaccine on Tuesday.
The EU on Tuesday demanded that China release citizen journalist Zhang Zhan and several other jailed reporters, lawyers and human rights activists. Zhang was jailed on Monday for four years over her coverage of the early stages of the outbreak in the original epicentre of Wuhan.
China reported 15 new locally transmitted cases on Tuesday, seven of them in Beijing. All of the capital’s new infections were close contacts of previous cases in the most recent flare-up. Two of the confirmed patients are drivers for ride-hailing apps, raising the risk that the cluster - which now stands at 17 - could continue to grow.
