The World Health Organization warned on Monday that there may never be a quick fix to the Covid-19 pandemic, despite the ongoing vaccine race.
"There is no panacea and there may never be," WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a video conference. “Clinical trials give us hope. This does not necessarily mean that we will have an effective vaccine, especially over time, he said.
But the new coronavirus can also be brought under control, he said, in particular by dint of “good practices” and “political commitment”. The WHO emergency committee "was very clear: when leaders work very closely with people, this disease can be brought under control."
"Test, isolate and treat patients"
"We must contain the outbreaks", "test, isolate and treat patients, search and quarantine their contacts", but also "inform", he stressed, urging the populations to continue to respect the barrier gestures to break the chains of transmission. “Do it all. And continue when it's under control! “, He launched.
The pandemic has killed at least 689,758 people around the world since the end of December, according to a report established by AFP on Monday. More than 18 million cases have been officially recorded, of which at least 10.5 million have been cured.
On July 10, the WHO dispatched an epidemiologist and an animal health specialist to China for an exploratory mission before the start of an investigation that the UN organization wants to conduct into the origin of the virus, which appeared in China at the end of 2019. .
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This mission completed the preparatory work, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Monday. "The WHO forward team that visited China has now completed its mission of laying the groundwork for joint efforts to identify the origins of the virus."
“WHO and Chinese experts have drafted the terms of reference for the studies and work program for an international team, led by WHO,” he explained. “The international team will include leading scientists and researchers from China and around the world. Epidemiological studies will begin in Wuhan to identify the potential source of infection of the first cases ”.
The search for the origin of the virus
According to Dr Mike Ryan of the WHO's Health Emergencies Program, the investigation is expected to be long-term, with "specific retrospective studies requiring a very in-depth approach".
"The real trick is to go to the grouped human cases (" clusters ") that occurred first, then to go back, in a systematic search for the first signal by which the barrier of the animal / human species was crossed" , according to him. "Once you understand where the barrier has been crossed, then you move on to studying more systematically on the animal side."
"The fact that the alarm went off" in Wuhan "does not necessarily mean that this is where the disease has passed from animals to humans," he said. For a majority of researchers, SARS-CoV-2 - the cause of the pandemic - may have originated in bats, but scientists believe it passed through another species before being transmitted to humans.
It is this piece of the puzzle that the international scientific community and the WHO hope to discover, to better target risky practices and prevent a new pandemic.
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