(CN) — With more than 9,000 new deaths reported on average each day around the world, the death toll from the coronavirus pandemic has surpassed 4.5 million.
In the past week, new infections and deaths declined for the first time in more than two months, but the head of the World Health Organization warned on Wednesday that the pandemic continues to rage in many parts of the world.
“This is obviously very welcome, but it doesn't mean much,” said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO director-general, during a news briefing. “Around the world, many countries are still seeing steep increases in cases and deaths and around the world we still see shocking inequities in access to vaccines.”
Tedros made his comments while on a visit to Berlin, where he and German Chancellor Angela Merkel celebrated the opening of the United Nations health agency's new Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence. Germany is investing $100 million into the hub, WHO said.
“The world needs to be able to detect new events with pandemic potential and to monitor disease control measures on a real-time basis to create effective pandemic and epidemic risk management,” Tedros said.
Dr. Mike Ryan, the WHO's chief of emergencies, said the hub will bring together experts from around the world and help countries prevent and handle future outbreaks.
“The faster we identify a new infectious disease, the faster we can respond,” Ryan said. “None of this is possible without better data, analytics and insights to improve the speed and adaptability of our response.”
At a time when global populations are interconnected like never before, Ryan said it is crucial for scientists and experts to harness genetic, laboratory, social, behavioral and logistical data when future outbreaks occur.
“Probably the only thing that moves faster than viruses is data and if we want to get ahead of the viruses we can use that advantage,” he said.
In opening the hub, German and WHO officials used the occasion to call on China to open its laboratories in Wuhan, an industrial Chinese city where the virus first emerged. The United States and its Western allies allege the novel coronavirus may have escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a lab that works on bat coronaviruses.
A team of international experts convened by the WHO visited Wuhan in January and February but it was given limited access to the lab. China is coming under pressure to allow for an in-depth audit of the lab. But China has rejected the lab leak theory and in turn called for an audit of Fort Detrick, a U.S. military lab in Maryland. China alleges the virus may have come from the U.S. lab. Neither side has provided evidence to back their claims.
“I call on China to finally become fully cooperative and to make the examination of the origin SARS-Cov-2 virus transparent to the international community,” said Jens Spahn, the German health minister.
Spahn said that most likely the new deadly coronavirus has zoonotic origins “but it's not totally unlikely that there are other origins too.”
“The learning process from the current pandemic is still ongoing obviously on a national level and internationally,” he said. “But one thing is totally clear already: To effectively prevent future pandemics we need more transparency, more real-time data sharing.”
Besides not allowing full access to its Wuhan coronavirus labs, China is accused of initially downplaying the threat from the new virus and silencing doctors who were warning about the emergence of a new virus.
The WHO leadership too has come under heavy criticism for parroting China's assertions at the outset of the pandemic. For example, in early January 2020 the agency issued a statement that cited Chinese experts who said the virus appeared to not be transmitted between humans.
Still, China has been praised for being much more open about this outbreak than it was in 2002 when a similar coronavirus emerged and spread around the planet. The first SARS outbreak killed about 774 people.
Meanwhile, world leaders are discussing a new global treaty to prepare the world for future pandemics and to force countries to be more open about health threats inside their borders. A new treaty could allow for sanctions to be imposed on countries for hiding information about outbreaks.
“What do you do when it fails? When there is no collaboration?” Tedros said. “Then there could be some kind of sanction.”
Tedros said “with openness, transparency we can save lives, but without transparency, when transparency lacks, we can lose lives.”
Without cooperation between nations, Tedros said there's the risk a health crisis will become politicized. “The best way to get out of political debate is just make it science and give data.”
Courthouse News reporter Cain Burdeau is based in the European Union.
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