world health organisation

"We are much closer to being able to say that the emergency phase of the pandemic is over -- but we're not there yet," said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus at a press briefing here. The reason behind is that "Omicron has proved to be significantly more transmissible than its predecessor, Delta, and continues to cause significant mortality due to the intensity of transmission".

"We have never been in a better position to end the pandemic," WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a press briefing in Geneva on Wednesday. According to the WHO, during the week of September 5-11, the number of new weekly cases worldwide decreased by 28 per cent over the previous week to more than 3.1 million.

Becerra took an antigen test on Monday morning and the result was positive, Xinhua news agency quoted HHS spokesperson Sarah Lovenheim as saying in a statement. "He is fully vaccinated and boosted against Covid-19, and is experiencing mild symptoms. He will continue to perform his duties as HHS Secretary, working in isolation," she added. Becerra, 64, had previously tested positive for Covid-19 in mid-May during a trip to Berlin.

According to Hans Kluge, the WHO regional director for Europe, Russia's attacks on health-care facilities and ambulances in Ukraine have left at least 75 people dead and 49 injured. In addition, the attacks have significantly damaged medical infrastructure in Ukraine, and severely impacted access to health care in many areas.

The censorship on Weibo and WeChat, China’s two largest social media platforms, targets WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus’ comments that expressed rare disagreement with Beijing’s policies. “When we talk about the zero-Covid strategy, we don’t think that it is sustainable, considering the behavior of the virus now and what we anticipate in the future,” Tedros told a media briefing Tuesday, citing the increased transmissibility of Omicron, CNN reported.

"The European region was the epicentre of the pandemic even before the emergence of Omicron, with surging cases of the Delta variant," Hans Kluge, Regional Director of WHO Europe, said in a statement. According to WHO Europe, the threat posed by Covid-19 is as serious as ever, with the highly transmissible Delta variant dominating throughout the region and the Omicron variant spreading rapidly with uncertain consequences, Xinhua news agency reported.

The WHO deemed Pakistan and Afghanistan to be dangerous countries in a recent statement by the Thirtieth Polio IHR Emergency Committee, stating that the two countries have failed to eradicate polio fully and may be responsible for the virus's global spread, the report said. Pakistan, on the other hand, has made remarkable strides against polio, as the incidence of Wild Polio Virus (WPV1) cases has decreased to zero in the previous ten months.

A total of 3.4 million new cases have been confirmed last week, during which approximately an average of 490,000 cases were identified each day, compared with 400,000 cases the week before. It confirmed that the novel coronavirus is spreading faster in the world, the WHO said in its weekly update.

"The pandemic treaty would be a generational commitment to keeping the world safe from new pathogens with pandemic potential in the future," Xinhua news agency quoted WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus while addressing a presser on Thursday.

WHO regional director Hans Henri Kluge said the vaccine roll-out was "unacceptably slow", reports dpa news agency. "Let me be clear, we must speed up the process by ramping up manufacturing, reducing barriers to administering vaccines, and using every single vial we have in stock, now," Kluge said.