The World Health Organization (WHO) said on Friday it hopes that the Coronavirus pandemic will get over globally in less than two years, faster than it took for the Spanish flu.
WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said, “We hope to finish this pandemic before less than two years,” while insisting that it should be possible to tame the novel Coronavirus faster than the deadly 1918 pandemic. He was talking to reporters from the WHO’s headquarters in Geneva.
Compared to back then, the world today is at a disadvantage due to its “globalisation, closeness, connectedness”, which has allowed COVID-19 to spread around the world at lightning speed, Tedros acknowledged.
“But the world also now has the advantage of far better technology,” he said.
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 COVID-19 pandemic has to date killed nearly 800,000 people and infected close to 23 million worldwide. While, the Spanish flu, the deadliest pandemic in modern history, killed as many as 50 million people and infected around 500 million around the world between February 1918 and April 2020.
Five times more people died of it than did in World War I. The first victims were recorded in the United States, before it spread to Europe and then around the world.
Globally, as many as 23,097,175 people have been infected with Coronavirus so far. 15,174,876 people have recovered of COVID-19 and 787,567 people have reportedly died due to the deadly virus.
Meanwhile, the US, the worst-hit country due to the pandemic has 5,795,777 cases. It is followed by Brazil, with 3,411,872 cases and at third number is India as Coronavirus infections in the country rose to 2,975,702.