WHO chief hopes coronavirus pandemic will end within two years

GENEVA: The World Health Organisation hopes the coronavirus crisis can be over in less than two years faster than it took for the 1918 Spanish flu.

“In our situation now with more technology, and of course with more connectiveness, the virus has a better chance of spreading, it can move fast because we are more connected now,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a briefing in Geneva.

“But at the same time we have also the technology to stop it and the knowledge to stop it. So we have a disadvantage of globalisation, closeness, connectedness but an advantage of better technology.”

“So we hope to finish this pandemic in less than two years,” he said, urging national unity and global solidarity. “That is really key with utilising the available tools to the maximum and hoping that we can have additional tools like vaccine.”

More than 22.81 million people have been reported to be infected by the coronavirus globally since it was first identified in China last year and 793,382​ have died.

The Spanish flu was the deadliest pandemic in modern history, killing as many as 50 million people and infected nearly 500 million around the world between February 1918 and April 2020.

Five times more people died than the first world war. The earliest victims were recorded in the United States, before it spread to Europe and then around the world. The 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,” WHO emergencies chief Michael Ryan told journalists.

Afterward, the flu virus 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,” Ryan said, adding that so far this coronavirus is not displaying a similar wave-like pattern. “Clearly, when the disease is not under control, it jumps straight back up,” he said.