(CN) — The global death toll from the coronavirus pandemic surged past 800,000 over the weekend, but the head of the World Health Organization said Monday “there is light at the end of the tunnel” thanks to new treatments and the prospect of vaccines.
The WHO chief's statement echoes what appears to be growing optimism among health experts that the pandemic can be curbed with an array of new drugs, treatments and vaccines. On Monday, financial markets also reacted to this sentiment and were buoyed by news from the United States on Sunday that it was approving blood plasma treatment for coronavirus patients.
The treatment, which is not a new technique, involves injecting sick patients with blood drawn from people who've been infected and built up antibodies.
Despite the glimmers of hope, the pandemic continues to rage in many parts of the world and there remain many uncertainties about the nature of the virus, its long-term health effects on those who recover and whether the pathogen will run rampant in a so-called second wave when the colder months arrive in the Northern Hemisphere and people are stuck indoors in close proximity.
An example of those uncertainties came out on Monday when researchers at the University of Hong Kong said they had discovered a 33-year-old man who had been reinfected with a different version of the virus after traveling to Spain. It appeared to be the first documented case of reinfection and raises questions about how effective any vaccine may be. The man tested positive for this new strain of the virus 142 days after he had fallen sick with Covid-19 the first time. He showed no symptoms upon reinfection, the researchers said.
Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO's technical lead on the pandemic, cautioned against drawing conclusions from the study and said the reinfection, though it appeared well-documented through genome sequencing, may be an anomaly. She said there's growing evidence most people build up immunity to the virus after they become infected.
“This may be an example of reinfection,” she said during a news briefing on Monday at the WHO headquarters in Geneva. But, she added, the possibility of reinfection needs to be studied on a much larger pool of people at the “population level.”
“We need to not jump to any conclusions,” van Kerkhove said. Based on other coronaviruses, she said people build up immunity, though that “may wane” over time.
For much of August, India has become the country reporting the highest number of new infections. Since the beginning of August, India has seen new infections rise daily from about 50,000 to more than 70,000 over the weekend. The United States and Brazil, the nations with by far the highest death tolls, are registering a slow decrease in new infections though deaths remain stubbornly high.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO director-general, offered a message of cautious hope Monday and said a growing number of vaccines are reaching advanced stages of clinical tests. He added that his agency hopes at least 2 billion vaccine doses can be distributed around the globe by the end of next year.
“A number of vaccines are now in the final stage of clinical trials and we all hope we will have multiple successful candidates that are both safe and effective,” Tedros said.
The United Nations health agency is urging the world to join forces and make sure vaccines are distributed globally in a coordinated fashion that ensures the most vulnerable people are vaccinated first – such as doctors and nurses on the front lines, those over the age of 65 and people suffering serious health problems. Tedros said 172 countries have pledged to join a WHO initiative to coordinate a global vaccination program.