As the WHO reports nearly 308,000 new cases in 24 hours, harsh judgements are being made about the handling of the pandemic. And in Oxford, vaccine trials have resumed.
With 307,930 confirmed coronavirus coronavirus cases recorded in twenty-four hours, Sunday 13 September marks a new all-time record. The previous peak dates back to 6 September, when 306,857 new cases were reported. This is what emerges from the monitoring carried out by the World Health Organization (WHO). Since the outbreak of the pandemic, more than 28.8 million cases have been confirmed worldwide, with a total of 921,801 deaths. Speaking to the AFP agency, the WHO's Regional Director for Europe, Hans Kluge, warned that after several months in which cases in the Old Continent have been rising while the number of deaths has remained stable, mortality is expected to start rising again between October and November.
The judgement of the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board (Gpmb), the independent monitoring body established by the World Health Organization itself together with the World Bank, is extremely harsh. As far back as last year the body had raised awareness of how ill-prepared the international community was to face the eventuality of a pandemic, which it considered extremely likely. Now that the warning has proved well-founded, it considers the global response to Covid-19 to have been "a collective failure to take pandemic prevention, preparedness and response seriously and make it a priority". These words appear in the report entitled "A World in Disorder", published on 14 September.
In many countries, the experts explain in a statement, "leaders have struggled to act quickly and decisively on the basis of scientific evidence and best practice". The result has been a deep and growing distrust that further undermines the capacity to respond to the emergency. The fundamental prerequisite for the effectiveness of any containment strategy is, in fact, that citizens embrace it with conviction. The pandemic, the report continues, has also laid bare the weakness of multilateral cooperation, exacerbated by geopolitical tensions. "Viruses do not respect borders. The only way out of this devastating pandemic lies on the path of collective action, which requires a strong and effective multilateral system," says Gpmb co-chair Gro Harlem Brundtland.
As a result, we are paying an exorbitant cost in health and human terms. But also in economic terms, with $11 trillion already spent to tackle the emergency and the prospect of a $10 trillion impact that will weigh for decades on the shoulders of the youngest generations above all. Given that "this will not be the last global health emergency", "the world cannot afford to be unprepared again".
A note of optimism comes from Oxford, where the university's Jenner Institute and pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca have long been working on the development of the ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccine. After the encouraging results of the first two phases of the trial and the launch of the third phase, on 9 September tests had been halted following an adverse reaction in one patient. This is a standard procedure, necessary to properly investigate the causes.
After a three-day pause and the green light from an independent committee and the UK medicines regulatory authority, on Saturday 12 September the university announced that the trial can safely continue. The volunteers involved number around 30,000 across the United States, the United Kingdom, Brazil and South Africa. To date, the Oxford vaccine is considered one of the most promising among the approximately 180 currently under development.
