‘Coronavirus may never go away,’ warns WHO

May 13: The novel coronavirus may never go away and populations around the world will have to learn to live with it, the World Health Organization (WHO) warned on Wednesday. WHO emergencies expert Mike Ryan said, “I think it is important we are realistic and I don’t think anyone can predict when this disease will disappear,” he added. “I think there are no promises in this and there are no dates. This disease may settle into a long problem, or it may not be.”

“What we all fear is a vicious cycle of public health and economic disasters if lockdowns are eased without the ability to detect fresh outbreaks,” Ryan, the head of the WHO’s emergencies programme, told an online news briefing. Ryan added that there was a “long, long way to go” on the path to returning to normal, insisting that countries would have to stay the course.

Meanwhile, commenting on the future of a probable vaccine for coronavirus, Gavin Yamey, Director of the Center for Policy Impact in Global Health at Duke University, said in a university podcast, “Unless we make this vaccine globally available, we are not going to be able to end the pandemic, because … an outbreak anywhere is an outbreak everywhere.”