WHO concerned as deaths double in a week

The World Health Organization said Wednesday that it was concerned about the recent ‘rapid escalation’ and global spread of the new coronavirus pandemic.

‘The number of deaths has more than doubled in the past week... in the next few days we will reach one million confirmed cases and 50,000 deaths,’ WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a virtual news conference.

The coronavirus pandemic has claimed more than 30,000 lives in Europe alone, US 4,000, a global tally showed Wednesday, in what the head of the United Nations has described as humanity’s worst crisis since Second World War.

Italy and Spain bore the brunt of the crisis, accounting for three in every four deaths on the continent, as the grim tally hit another milestone even though half of the planet’s population is already under some form of lockdown in a battle to halt contagion.

At least 43,082 deaths have been recorded.

More than 865,970 cases of infection have been recorded in 186 countries and territories since the epidemic started in China in December, according to an AFP tally compiled towards 1200 GMT Wednesday based on official sources.

Italy has 12,428 deaths, Spain 9,053, the United States 4,081, and France 4,032. These four countries all have death tolls above that of mainland China, which has recorded 3,312 deaths. Iran has 3,036 deaths.

Emergency field hospitals were readied in New York’s Central Park and at the home of the US Open tennis tournament as the number of American deaths from the coronavirus pandemic surged past 4,000 — higher than the toll in China.

The pandemic has killed more than 1,700 New Yorkers and president Donald Trump, a native of the city, warned in Washington of ‘a very, very painful two weeks’ as the United States registered its deadliest 24 hours of what he called a ‘plague’.

Already the hardest-hit area, America’s financial capital is in a race to ramp up hospital capacity before cases peak.

In a scramble to halt the contagion, governments have shut schools, most shops, and ordered millions of people to work from home.

Cancellations of key events on the global calendar have swept both the sports and cultural worlds, with the Edinburgh arts festival the latest to be scrapped.

For UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres, the extraordinary upheaval spurred by the virus presents a real danger to the relative peace the world has seen over the last few decades.

The disease ‘represents a threat to everybody in the world and... an economic impact that will bring a recession that probably has no parallel in the recent past,’ he said.

‘The combination of the two facts and the risk that it contributes to enhanced instability, enhanced unrest, and enhanced conflict are things that make us believe that this is the most challenging crisis we have faced since the Second World War.’

With most business activity grinding to a halt for an undetermined period of time, scenes of economic desperation and unrest were emerging across the globe.

In Italy, queues were lengthening at soup kitchens while some supermarkets were reportedly pillaged.

Half a million more people now need help to afford meals, Italy’s biggest union for the agriculture sector Coldiretti said, adding to the 2.7 million already in need last year.

‘Usually we serve 152,525 people. But now we’ve 70,000 more requests,’ confirmed Roberto Tuorto, who runs a food aid association.

It was crucial to ‘ensure that the economic crisis unleashed by the virus doesn’t become a security crisis,’ he warned.

The economic pain of lockdowns is especially acute in poorer nations.

In Tunisia several hundred protested a week-old lockdown that has disproportionately hit the poor.

Africa’s biggest city Lagos was just into its second full day of lockdown on Wednesday — but with some of the world’s biggest slums, home to millions who live hand-to-mouth, containment will be a challenge.

Wary of a collapse of the world’s economy, the globe’s leading central bankers have pumped billions of liquidity into the system.

In the European Union, the terms of a rescue plan threatened to divide the bloc.

The economic cost of the crisis was still piling up as lockdowns remain at the forefront of official disease-stopping arsenals — a strategy increasingly borne out by science.

Researchers said China’s decision to shutter Wuhan, ground zero for the pandemic, may have prevented hundreds of thousands of new cases.

‘Our analysis suggests that without the Wuhan travel ban and the national emergency response there would have been more than 700,000 confirmed COVID-19 cases outside of Wuhan’ by mid-February, said Oxford University’s Christopher Dye.

For now, the focus of the health sector in the hardest hit countries remains the scramble for available facilities to treat patients.

Emergency hospitals are popping up in event spaces while distressed medical staff make grim decisions about how to distribute limited protective gear, beds and life-saving respirators.

In scenes unimaginable in peacetime, around a dozen white tents were erected to serve as a field hospital in New York’s Central Park.

But even with the extended capacity, doctors say they are still having to make painful choices.

News Courtesy: www.newagebd.net