‘Don’t hug’: WHO’s advice for Christmas holidays as world prepares for Covid-19 vaccines
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The World Health Organization has an unwelcome but potentially life-saving message for the holiday season: don’t hug.
To stop the spread of the coronavirus, WHO’s emergencies chief said that the “shocking” rate of Covid-19 cases and deaths, particularly in the United States, means that people shouldn’t get too close to their loved ones this year.
“The epidemic in the US is punishing. It’s widespread,” Dr Michael Ryan said on Monday. “It’s quite frankly, shocking, to see one to two persons a minute die in the US – a country with a wonderful, strong health system (and) amazing technological capacities,” he said.
Ryan was responding to a question during a news conference about whether hugs could be considered “close contact” – which the UN health agency has generally advised against in areas of high coronavirus transmission.
The United States’ floundering efforts to quell the Covid-19 pandemic have been widely criticised, with a daily death toll of over 2,500 for five days in a row last week. The US accounts for a third of all Covid-19 cases in the world with more than 283,000 deaths to date.
Globally, the novel coronavirus has killed more than 1.5 million and infected almost 15 million people since it was first detected in China last December.