Over 100,000 new coronavirus cases recorded globally in 24 hours — WHO

By Aisha Mohammed with Agency Report

The World Health Organisation (WHO) on Wednesday raised the alarm that the world recorded over 100,000 new cases of coronavirus over the last 24 hours.

In a press conference addressed the WHO Director-General, Tedros Ghebreyesus at the agency’s headquarters, Geneva he informed that we still have a long way to go in stemming the tide of Covid-19 pandemic.

According to the WHO official, the majority of the newly confirmed cases are coming from the Americas, followed by Europe. He said the U.S. and Russia reported 45,251 and 9,263 new cases on Tuesday, respectively.

But the world coronavirus worldometer, so far noted, the world has recorded over five million global cases and seen over 325,000 fatalities since the virus emerged less than five months ago.

Before now, the WHO has been warning world leaders that there can be “no going back to business as usual” following the COVID-19 outbreak, which has affected economies in nearly every country around the globe.

The agency has told countries that they will need to live with the coronavirus for the foreseeable future even as cases level off or decline in some countries while peaking in others and resurging in areas where the pandemic appeared to be under control.

The WHO officials said while social distancing measures put in place in numerous countries to slow the spread of the coronavirus have been successful; the virus remains “extremely dangerous.”

The new record in cases comes as President Donald Trump threatens to permanently pull funding from the agency, according to CNBC news.

WHO officials said they are worried their emergency programs will suffer if Trump follows through on his threats.

The executive director of WHO’s health emergencies program, Mike Ryan said most funding from the United States goes directly to the programme that helps countries all over the world in “all sorts of fragile and difficult settings,”

“We’ll obviously have to work with other partners to ensure those funds can still flow,” Mr Ryan said. “This is going to be a major implication for delivering essential health services to some of the most vulnerable people in the world and we trust developed donors will, if necessary, step in to fill that gap.”

Mr Ghebreyesus also said the WHO is “very concerned” about the rise in cases in low-and middle-income countries.

He said South Korea has been ‘impressive’ building on its experience of the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome-related (MERS) coronavirus “to quickly implement a comprehensive strategy to find, isolate, test and care for every case, and trace every contact.”

“This was critical to the Republic of Korea curtailing the first wave and now quickly identifying and containing new outbreaks,” he said.