Vaccinate whole world to end pandemic: UN Chief
UN, BANGLADESH, INDIA: Giving a clarion call to world leaders to make 2022 a “true moment of recover UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Monday said that the COVID-19 pandemic has to be confronted with equity and fairness, cautioning that failure to vaccinate every person will give rise to new variants that will bring daily life and economies to a grinding halt.
Guterres, in his virtual remarks to the opening of the 2022 World Economic Forum (WEF), said: The last two years have demonstrated a simple but brutal truth if we leave anyone behind, we leave everyone behind”.
He gave a clarion call to stand together to make 2022 a true moment of recovery.
Noting that the global event is taking place in the shadow of an enormously difficult period for economies, people and the planet, Guterres urged the international community, especially the global businesses, that we need all hands on deck for recovery and economic rebound this coming year.
He underlined the need to confront the COVID-19 pandemic, which has raged on across the world for over two years, infecting over 304 million people and killing 5.4 million, with equity and fairness.
Guterres lamented that shamefully, vaccination rates in high-income countries are seven times higher than in African countries.
If we fail to vaccinate every person, we give rise to new variants that spread across borders and bring daily life and economies to a grinding halt, he said, even as the latest COVID-19 variant Omicron spreads at a lightening speed across the world, exponentially increasing infection rates and threatening to burden the healthcare infrastructure in nations.
Meanwhile, In the wake of an ongoing COVID-19 resurgence, private and public testing facilities in Bangladesh’s capital Dhaka are now witnessing an unprecedented influx of patients.
Long queues were seen on Sunday at one of the largest testing centers in Dhaka, Shaheed Suhrawardy Medical College Hospital, where tests are conducted at a nominal fee, reports Xinhua news agency.
In the past week, queues also got longer outside many other private and public facilities, which share RT-PCR (reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction) results within 12 hours.
Bangladeshi authorities on January 13 started to impose stringent rules to combat a fresh spike in Covid-19 infections.
In parts of Dhaka and elsewhere in the country, mobile courts initiated drives and fined those violating the restrictions. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has urged unvaccinated people to get jabbed.
According to the official data, the COVID-19 fatality rate in Bangladesh is now 1.74 per cent and the current recovery rate is 95.99 per cent.
Meanwhile, India’s capital Delhi and financial hub Mumbai have reported a big fall in Covid-19 infections in the past two days and most of those who contracted the virus have recovered at home, authorities said yesterday.
Mumbai’s daily new infections fell below 10,000 on Sunday for the first time since early this month, after touching an all-time high of 20,971 on January 7. It reported 7,895 infections late on Sunday, Mumbai’s municipal corporation said.
Delhi’s cases have fallen consistently since hitting a peak of 28,867 on January 13 and is expected to be fewer than 15,000 on Monday, for the first time since early January, the city government’s health minister told reporters.
Both cities have said more than 80% of their COVID-19 hospital beds have remained unoccupied since the fast-transmitting Omicron variant led to a massive surge in cases from the start of the year.
– THE TELEGRAPH INDIA, IANS,GULF TIMES