4 years ago
Roughly one in 10 people may have been infected with the novel coronavirus, leaving the vast majority of the world's population vulnerable to the related COVID-19 disease, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Monday.
Mike Ryan, WHO's top emergency expert, told the agency's executive board that outbreaks were surging in parts of southeast Asia and that cases and deaths were on the rise in parts of Europe and the eastern Mediterranean region.
Ryan said this to attendees from governments who make up the executive board and provide much of WHO's funding.
The estimate – which would amount to more than 760 million people based on a current world population of about 7.6 billion – far outstrips the number of confirmed cases as tallied by both the WHO and Johns Hopkins University, now more than 35 million worldwide. Experts have long said that the number of confirmed cases greatly undershoots the true figure.
Ryan did not elaborate on the estimate. Dr. Margaret Harris, a WHO spokeswoman, said it was based on an average of antibody studies conducted around the world.
She said the estimated 90 percent of people remaining without infection means the virus has “opportunity” to spread further “if we don’t take action to stop it” such as by contact-tracing and tracking of cases by health officials.
The comments came during a special session of the executive board to consider the follow-up to its previous meeting, in May, that passed a resolution to look into the world's – and WHO's – response to the pandemic, among other things.
The two-day meeting is the first by the executive board since the Trump administration set off a one-year countdown this summer toward pulling the United States out of the WHO next July.
