Covid can’t be beaten by one country at a time – UN boss
The UN chief Antonio Guterres has called for a concerted effort in the fight against the COVID-19 disease that has so far claimed the lives about 3.4 million people globally.
Addressing the opening of the World Health Organization’s annual assembly of member states on Monday, May 24, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said, “the most vulnerable are suffering most, and I fear this is far from over.”
“The world is at war against COVID-19, calling for the application of wartime logic to the inequitable access to the weapons is needed to fight the pandemic.”
Mr Guterres added that governments across the world should act in sync since the virus cannot be tackled by a divided globe, lest a scenario where rich countries end up vaccinating the majority of their people and open their economies, while the virus continues to cause deep suffering by circling and mutating in the poorest countries is witnessed.
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“Further spikes and surges could claim hundreds of thousands of lives, and slow the global economic recovery,” he said, noting that “COVID-19 cannot be beaten one country at a time.”
The UN chief last week called on the G20 to set up a task force that brings together all countries with vaccine production capacities and others who can help boost the manufacturing of vaccines and other tools needed to battle the pandemic.
The latest data show that only 0.3 per cent of the total COVID-19 vaccine doses administered have been in the world’s poorest countries.
The world has so far recorded about 167 million cases of COVID-19, with over 3.4 million deaths.
The US still remains the worst affected accounting for the world’s highest number of cases and deaths at about 33.1 million and about 590,000 respectively, followed by India with about 26.8 million cases and about 304,000 deaths.
At the same time, over 1.4 billion doses of vaccine have been administered globally.
Meanwhile, Kenya has in the last 24 hours reported fourteen COVID-19 deaths, all of them marked as late death reports after conducting facility record audits within the last one month bringing the total fatalities in the country to 3,073.
At the same time, the Ministry of Health has reported another 111 positive cases pushing the total caseload to 168,543 since the pandemic hit the country.
So far Kenya has vaccinated about 954,000 people against the virus.
