MANILA – While the Filipino people are jubilant for the recent declaration of President Rodrigo Duterte to ease quarantine restrictions in most provinces and cities in the country, the World Health Organization (WHO) warns the world that it is not yet time to slacken the guard against the pandemic.
The CBS News reported that the WHO said Monday, that “the worst is yet to come” and “it is moment to recommit to the fight to save lives” noting the death toll surpassed 500,000 and the number of confirmed infection topped 10 million, six months since the novel coronavirus outbreak.
WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a virtual briefing that nobody imagined how the world and the lives of the people would be thrown into turmoil by this virus. “We all want this to be over. We all want to get on with our lives. But the hard reality is this is not even close to being over,” he said.
Though he is generally hopeful, Dr. Tedros projected a gloomy picture in the future saying “Although many countries have made some progress, globally the pandemic is actually speeding up and we are in this for a long haul.”
He also said that WHO will be sending a team to China next week in connection with the search for the origin of the virus that sparked the global pandemic. Since May the organization has been pressing China to invite its experts to help investigate the animal origins of the coronavirus.
China officials repeatedly denied that the virus that caused the pandemic came from their biological laboratories in Wuhan or anywhere in the country.
Dr. Tedros continued that “we can fight the virus better when we know everything about it, including how it started.” He did not, however, specify the composition of the team that will investigate the origin of the virus or what their mission specifically includes.
One origin theory offers that the virus jumped from animal to humans, possibly from a market in Wuhan selling exotic animals for meat, which is near an important biological laboratory in China.
