Take urgent action to prevent further COVID-19 infections: WHO

Delhi, April 16 – With COVID-19 cases rising steeply, WHO on today urged countries in South-East Asia Region to apply all tools to prevent further infections and save lives.

Dr Poonam Khetrapal Singh, Regional Director, WHO South-East Asia Region said, “Cases are rising for the past several weeks. These are worrying trends as we continue to see opening of societies and emergence of variants. Basic public health measures remain the foundation of pandemic response and we need to reinforce them. We need to apply all the tools we have, and apply them together”.

Surveillance, testing, contact tracing, isolation, supportive quarantine and compassionate care – they all work to stop infections and save lives, and so do vaccines, she said. Consistent use of masks, hand hygiene, ventilation, social distancing continues to be our best guards even today, and should be strictly followed, even by people who have already been vaccinated.

On the role of virus variants in the current surge of cases, Dr Khetrapal Singh said, WHO has been tracking variants globally since the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak. With the emergence of new variants of concern, these efforts have been stepped up to set up systems to quickly identify and study emerging variants.

The information on the occurrence of variants is not systematic and universal yet. WHO is working with countries for genomic sequencing on a subset of cases. We are working with the scientific community to encourage wider sharing of sequences along with their metadata, she said.

But regardless of which variants are circulating, the basic measures remain the same.