Average 80,000 coronavirus cases reported daily in April: WHO
   Date :08-May-2020

80000 coronavirus cases _
 
 
By Yoshita Singh :
 
UNITED NATIONS,
 
AN AVERAGE of 80,000 COVID-19 cases were reported each day in April to the World Health Organisation, the top UN health agency has said, noting that South Asian nations like India and Bangladesh are seeing a spike in the infections while the numbers are declining in regions such as Western Europe. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Wednesday that countries must also be able to manage any risk of the disease being imported into their territories, and communities should be fully educated to adjust to what will be a “new norm”.
 
He said that as the countries press forward in the common fight against COVID-19, they should also lay the groundwork for resilient health systems globally. “More than 3.5 million cases of COVID-19 and almost 2,50,000 deaths have now been reported to the WHO. Since the beginning of April, an average of around 80,000 new cases have been reported to the WHO every day,” Ghebreyesus said in Geneva on Wednesday. Asserting that the virus cases were not just numbers, he said: “every single case is a mother, a father, a son, a daughter, a brother, sister or friend”.
 
He said while the numbers are declining in Western Europe, more cases are being reported every day from Eastern Europe, Africa, South-East Asia, the Eastern Mediterranean and the Americas. Even within regions and within countries, there are divergent trends, the agency added. While some countries are reporting an increase in COVID-19 cases over time, many have seen caseloads rise because they have ramped up testing, the WHO official said.
 
“We’ve also seen in Europe and Western Europe a fundamental decrease in the number of cases, but we have seen an associated increase in the number of cases reported in places like the Russian Federation. Southeast, the Western Pacific areas are relatively on the downward trend like Korea, but then we do see in South Asia, in places like Bangladesh, in India, some trends towards increase.