Coronavirus: WHO urges governments to act and not be ‘paralysed by the fear of failure’
- Europe is now the epicentre of the pandemic, leader of global health body says
- A multipronged approach is urged: testing, contact tracing, quarantine and social distancing. ‘Do it all,’ WHO urges.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Friday that it would resist being dragged into a blame game over which country was responsible for the coronavirus pandemic and urged governments to move swiftly to deal with the situation instead of being “paralysed by the fear of failure”.
As the number of cases being reported daily worldwide now exceeds the peak daily new infections reported by China at the height of its epidemic in February, the head of the UN agency’s health emergencies programme, Michael Ryan, said at a briefing that a major worry was that “everyone is afraid of the consequences of error”.
“The greatest error is not to move,” he said. “The greatest error is to be paralysed by the fear of failure. And I think that’s the single biggest lesson I’ve learned in Ebola responses in the past.”
At the same briefing, WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Europe had become the epicentre of the pandemic.
As of early Friday, some 162,000 infections had been reported in 123 countries and territories, with more than 5,000 fatalities, he said.