WHO said on Friday that it hopes the planet will be free from coronavirus pandemic in less than two years, faster than it took for the Spanish flu.
“We hope to finish this pandemic before less than two years,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told the reporters from the WHO’s headquarters in Geneva, insisting that it should be possible to tame the novel corona virus faster than the deadly 1918 pandemic.
As compared to back then, the world today is at a disadvantage due to its “globalisation, closeness, connectedness”, which has lead the novel Covid to spread across the world at lightning speed, Tedros accepted.
He said, but the world also now has the advantage with much better technology.
By “utilising the available tools to the maximum and hoping that we can have additional tools like vaccines, I think we can finish it in a shorter time than the 1918 flu.”
The Coronavirus pandemic has till date it killed nearly 800,000 people and infected around 23 million worldwide, according to a record from official sources compiled by AFP.
But the dreadful pandemic in modern history is Spanish flu, which killed about 50 million victims and infected around 500 million across the world within span from February, 1918 to April, 2020.
5 times more people died due to it than it did in World War I. The first victims were recorded in the US, prior it spread to Europe and then around the world.
That pandemic came in three waves, with the deadliest second wave beginning in the latter half of 1918.
“It took three waves for the disease to infect most of the susceptible individuals,” Michael Ryan, WHO emergencies chief told journalists.
After that, the flu behind the pandemic evolved into a far less deadly seasonal bug, which returned for decades.
“Very often, a pandemic virus settles into a seasonal pattern over time,” said Ryan.
He warned however, so far, “this virus is not displaying a similar wave-like pattern. Clearly, when the disease is not under control, it jumps straight back up.”
