Gloomy outlook from a COVID-19 WHO official: "This virus will never go away"
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"This virus may never go away."
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It is the sad reality that Mike Ryan, director of emergencies at the World Health Organization, said Wednesday in a briefing on coronaviruses.
At a virtual press conference in Geneva, Ryan said the world should prepare for the possibility that a vaccine against COVID-19 may not be found. Even if we end up developing, it would still take a "massive effort" to spread it around the world and control the virus, a "massive shot to the moon".
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"It is important to put this on the table: this virus can become another endemic virus in our communities, and this virus will never go away," he said. "I think it is important that we are realistic and I don't think anyone can predict when this disease will go away. I think there is no promise about it and that ; there are no dates. This disease may or may not be a long-term problem. "
Ryan said that one way or another, humanity may have to learn to manage COVID-19. "HIV has not gone away, but we got along with the virus," he said, noting that although there is a measles vaccine, it has not been eradicated, which shows that a vaccine does not automatically clear the virus. .
At the same briefing, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of WHO, said that social distancing remains the best way to control the spread of the coronavirus for the time being.
"The trajectory is in our hands, and it is everyone's business, and we must all help stop this pandemic," he said.
There are currently more than 100 potential vaccines in development and President Donald Trump would be ready to put an old GlaxoSmithKline
GSK
executive in charge of US efforts to produce a vaccine.
As of Wednesday, there were more than 4.3 million confirmed cases of coronavirus worldwide, with nearly 300,000 deaths, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. In the United States, there have been nearly 1.4 million cases and more than 84,000 deaths.