The World Health Organization says the number of new COVID-19 cases has dropped dramatically, and has urged the world to seize the opportunity to end the pandemic.
Newly reported cases of the disease, which has killed millions since being identified in late 2019, last week fell to the lowest level since March 2020, said WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
“We have never been in a better position to end the pandemic,” he said. “We are not there yet, but the end is in sight.” However, reports The Citizen, the world needed to step up to “seize this opportunity”, he added. “If we don’t take this opportunity now, we run the risk of more variants, more deaths, more disruption, and more uncertainty.”
The number of reported cases fell 28% to 3.1m during the week ending 11 September, after a 12% drop a week earlier, but the agency warned that the declining number of reported cases was deceptive, as many countries have cut back on testing and may not be detecting the less serious cases.
“We know the number of cases being reported to WHO are an underestimate,” said Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO technical lead on COVID. “We feel that far more cases are actually circulating than are being reported to us,” she said, cautioning that the virus “is circulating at a very intense level around the world at the present time”.
Since the start of the pandemic, WHO has tallied more than 605m cases, and some 6.4m deaths, although both those numbers are also believed to be serious undercounts.
A WHO study published in May based on excess mortality seen in various countries during the pandemic estimated that up to 17m people may have died from COVID in 2020 and 2021.
Van Kerkhove said there were likely to be “future waves of infection, potentially at different time points throughout the world, caused by different sub-variants of Omicron or even different variants of concern”. But, she added, “those do not need to translate into future waves of death”.
The WHO has recommended countries invest in vaccinating 100% of the most at-risk groups, including health workers and the elderly, and to maintain testing and sequencing for the virus.
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