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Ahram Online
“The pandemic disease caused by the coronavirus is accelerating”, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Monday. More than 300,000 infection cases, from nearly every country worldwide, were recorded and reported.
“While it took 67 days from the first reported case to reach the first 100,000 cases of COVID-19, it took only 11 days for the second 100,000 cases and just four days for the third 100,000 cases”, WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said.
“We are not prisoners to statistics. We’re not helpless bystanders. We can change the trajectory of this pandemic”, Tedros told an online briefing.
He called for global political commitment to change the trajectory of the pandemic, urging countries to take both defensive and proactive measures.
“Asking people to stay at home and other social distancing measures are an important way of slowing down the spread of the virus and buying time, but they are only defensive measures”, he said.
“To win we need to attack the virus with aggressive and targeted tactics, testing every suspect case, isolating and caring for every confirmed case and tracing and quarantining every close contact”.
Asked about the 2020 Olympics due to be held in Tokyo, Mike Ryan, head of WHO’s emergencies programme, said, “the WHO was feeding into deliberations by the International Olympic Committee (IOC), the Japanese government and the Tokyo 2020 Committee”.
Australia and Canada said they are withdrawing from the 2020 Games. Organisers are facing increasing pressure to postpone the games for the first time in its 124-year modern history.
Ryan said, “any decision to postpone the games would be made by Japan and the IOC. We have every confidence that the Japanese government and the IOC will not proceed with any Games, should they be dangerous to athletes or spectators”.
