Director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus of the World Health Organisation (WHO) has warned that “the worst is yet ahead of us.”
As countries are easing lockdown measures the WHO are warning of a second wave which could be more deadly than what the world has seen thus far.
He told reporters at a press briefing at the WHO headquarters in Geneva, “Trust us. The worst is yet ahead of us.
“Let’s prevent this tragedy. It’s a virus that many people still don’t understand.”
Tedros did not explain why he believes the pandemic is going to get worse, despite almost 170,00 global deaths and 2.5m people infected globally.
Last week the US President Donald Trump criticised the WHO over their handling of the pandemic, and he pulled funding to the organisation.
Trump said the WHO failed to adequately share “in a timely and transparent” way, information over the outbreak after it erupted in Wuhan, China in December.
Tedros said, “There is no secret in WHO because keeping things confidential or secret is dangerous. It’s a health issue.
“This virus is dangerous. It exploits cracks between us when we have differences.”
Dr Tedros US Centres for Disease Control (CDC) with prevention staff, who have been seconded to work with his agency. Suggesting this is a sign of the WHO’s transparency.
He said, “Having CDC staff means there is nothing hidden from the US from day one.
“Our CDC colleagues also know that we give information immediately to anyone.”
He called coronavirus, “Public Enemy Number One” and added, “We have been warning from day one: this is a devil that everybody should fight.”
Dr Tedros likened coronavirus to the Spanish flu, he said the virus has a very dangerous combination… like the 1918 flu that killed up to 100 million people.”
The Spanish flu lasted from January 1918 to December 1920 and wiped out a third of the world’s population at the time.
Over 500m people were infected with the virus and it was estimated that the death toll was between 17m and 50m people, and possibly as high as 100m making it the most dangerous pandemic in history.
In 1993 laude Hannoun, the leading expert on the 1918 flu for the French Pasteur Institute, asserted the former virus was likely to have come from China.
It then mutated in the United States near Boston and from there spread to Brest, France, Europe’s battlefields, Europe, and the world with Allied soldiers and sailors as the main disseminators.
The WHO called this “disease X” and was added to the list of blueprint priority diseases as a “known unknown” in 2018.
Coronavirus now officially called Covid-19 has already morphed from a mild to a deadly virus and is fast becoming a possible contender for “disease X.”
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