Coronavirus around the World: A global decline in cases and the Committee of Experts issues its report on the emergence of the virus

The World Organization has set one of its priorities to increase the ambition of the Covax mechanism to help all countries eliminate the Covid-19 pandemic.

The World Health Organization said that we may face a third and fourth wave of the Coronavirus if we are not careful, and it also called for the suspension of patent rights for anti-Covid-19 tools, at a time when the number of daily infections in the world has halved within a month.

The Director-General of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said on Friday, that it is time to suspend the patent rights of the tools that poor countries need to fight the Coronavirus pandemic.

“One of our main priorities now is to increase the ambition of Covax in helping all countries eliminate the Covid-19 pandemic,” he said at a press conference held before a meeting of the World Trade Organization next week.

He added that this means working urgently to increase production, referring to the global platform for sharing vaccines, which he said will have sent products to 51 countries by next week.

On another topic, Ghebreyesus said that the expert team, which was sent to Wuhan, China, in January to investigate the origin of the Covid-19 epidemic, will release its report in the week beginning March 15.

He promised that Member States would be the first to see it before it was published, and that they would review the results before them.

The WHO had initially announced that the expert team would quickly issue a preliminary report before its final report. However, the initial report was abandoned in February without providing a convincing explanation.

The experts reviewed, during a press conference at the conclusion of their mission in Wuhan, their various hypotheses about the transmission of the virus that causes Covid-19 from animals to humans.

And it seemed that they had ruled out the hypothesis that the virus had leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, as the administration of former US President Donald Trump had suggested.

However, the Director-General of the Health Organization confirmed after a while that “all the assumptions are still on the table”.

Ned Price, a spokesman for the US State Department, called on Beijing Thursday to be transparent.

“What we have been clearly referring to for several weeks is that we have deep concerns about how to publish the first findings of the investigation team and questions about the basic process for arriving at these conclusions,” he said.

In an open letter published last Thursday, 24 international researchers called for a new, independent and more in-depth investigation, and condemned the “structural restrictions” they said were imposed on the work of WHO experts during their visit to China.

The number of daily cases in the world decreased by half within a month, as it reached 743 thousand cases per day in the week between 5 and 11 January, and became 362 thousand per day in the week between 12 and 18 February.

And since the start of the epidemic, the number of daily infections has never been recorded, a strong and long-lasting decline to this extent, according to the French Press Agency.

The number of daily new infections recorded a significant decline in Latin America (-20%, 61,608 daily cases), and a smaller decline in Africa (-6%, 9426), as well as in Asia (-4%, 31,406).

However, the number of cases increased in the Middle East (+ 10%, 31 thousand and 324), Europe (+ 8%, 157 thousand and 760) and Latin America (+ 3%, 91 thousand and 409).

The number of new deaths in the world decreased by 7%, reaching 62,551 deaths last week. 

That is, an average of 8,865 deaths per day.