GENEVA, Switzerland
Six months since
the new coronavirus
outbreak, the pandemic is still far
from over, the World Health Organization said Monday, warning that "the
worst is yet to come." Reaching the half-year milestone just as the death toll surpassed 500,000 and the number of confirmed infections topped 10 million, the WHO
said it was a moment to recommit to the fight to save lives.
"Six months ago, none of us could have imagined how our world -- and our
lives -- would be thrown into turmoil by this new virus," WHO chief Tedros
Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a virtual briefing.
"We all want this to be over. We all want
to get on with our lives. But the hard reality is this is not even close to
being over," he said. "Although many countries have made some
progress, globally the pandemic is actually speeding up."
Tedros added that “we’re
all in this for the long haul."
"We will need even greater stores of resilience, patience, humility and generosity in the months ahead," he said. "We have already lost so much -- but we cannot lose hope."
In an atmosphere of
global political division and fractures on a national level, "the worst is
yet to come. I'm sorry to say that," he said.
"With this kind of environment and
condition, we fear the worst."
The WHO is sending a team to China next week in
connection with the search for the origin of the virus that sparked the global
pandemic.
The organisation has been pressing China since
early May to invite in its experts to help investigate the animal origins of
the coronavirus.
"We can fight the
virus better when we know everything about the virus, including how it
started," Tedros said. "We will be sending a team next week to China
to prepare for that and we hope that that will lead into understanding how the
virus started."
He did not specify the make-up of the team, nor
what specifically their mission would consist of.
Scientists believe the virus jumped from animals to humans, possibly from a market in Wuhan selling exotic animals for meat.
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