Adire signal has been emitted by the World Health Organization, at once debunked by Donald Trump and praised by Xi Jinping. It isn’t exactly the foreboding of the Jeremiah, but a distressing conclusion that is embedded in medical evidence.
WHO has warned that coronavirus “may never go away” as its experts have predicted that a “global mental health crisis” caused by the pandemic was looming. Flattening of the curve is unlikely to be enduring just as fudging the death certificate can only make confusion worse confounded.
The UN entity has cautioned against trying to predict how long coronavirus would keep circulating, and has called for a “massive effort” to overcome it.
“It is important to put this on the table that this virus may become just another endemic virus in our communities, and this virus may never go away,” is the grim prognosis of Michael Ryan, WHO’s chief of emergencies.
“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.” No less distressing must be the report of WHO’s mental health department, one that was furnished to the UN last week. It has warned of another looming crisis.
“The isolation, the fear, the uncertainty, the economic turmoil ~ they all cause or could cause psychological distress,” said the department’s director, Devora Kestel. She said the world could expect to experience an upsurge in the severity of mental illness, including amongst children, young people and healthcare workers.
The report covers a cross-section of stakeholders, and not merely in hospitals. The mental health and wellbeing of society in general has been severely impacted by this crisis and are a priority to be addressed urgently. WHO’s warning coincides with Russia registering the second highest number of infections at 242,271, behind the US with just under 1.4 million.
The official death toll in Russia is 2,212, although the Kremlin has ascribed the deaths of more than 60 per cent of coronavirus patients in April to other causes. Moscow, the centre of the country’s outbreak, accounted for 1,232 of those deaths.
Has doctoring of data now crossed frontiers? For, Tatyana Golikova, Russia’s health minister, has denied any “falsification of statistics”. A former Communist nation has been fairly forthright in its projection. It was only to be expected perhaps that a contrarian perspective would be advanced by President Trump.
He has said that warnings from his top infectious diseases expert on the dangers of lifting restrictions too soon were “not acceptable”. And then on a note of pessimism, he said he was “surprised” by Anthony Fauci’s caution on reopening the economy and schools too soon.
The path ahead is both highly uncertain and subject to significant downside risks that can affect both the body and the mind. And this is the chief import of WHO’s warning.