COPENHAGEN, April 9 (NNN-AGENCIES) — Despite “positive signs” from some countries, it is too early to scale back measures aimed at containing the spread of the coronavirus, the World Health Organization’s European office said.
“Now is not the time to relax measures,” WHO regional director for Europe, Hans Kluge, told a news conference.
“It is the time to once again double and triple our collective efforts to drive towards suppression with the whole support of society.”
Kluge called on “all countries” to strengthen their efforts in three main areas.
Firstly, protecting health service workers, including training and making sure they have the necessary support structures.
Second, authorities needed to focus on stopping and slowing the spread of COVID-19 by using public health measures aimed at separating “healthy people from suspected and probable cases”.
Third, governments and authorities had to continuously communicate with communities to make people conform to “current and possible future measures”.
Several European countries have announced plans to start easing the restrictive measures introduced to curb the spread of the disease.
On Monday, Austria announced plans to start opening some businesses and public parks from April 14.
Denmark and Norway, who have both adopted strategies of “semi-confinement”, have also signalled loosening some measures later in April.
WHO Europe noted that while cases in Spain and Italy — Europe’s worst hit countries — were still increasing, the rate of increase seemed to have slowed following the introduction of restrictive measures and lockdowns.
It also noted progress in Austria, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland.
But Kluge expressed alarm at the “dramatic increase in virus spread” in Turkey over the last week, and said a fresh surge had been observed in Sweden.
Cases in Israel, Ukraine, Belgium and Norway were also still on the rise.
WHO Europe reported that a total of 687,236 confirmed cases had been reported across the continent, with 52,824 deaths.
Separately, the head of the European Research Council has resigned reportedly in protest at the bloc’s handling of its coronavirus response.
Mauro Ferrari, who only took over as president of the ERC in January, said he was “extremely disappointed” by the EU’s response to the pandemic, which has hit Italy and Spain particularly hard.
In BRUSSELS, a spokesman for the Europan Commission, the bloc’s executive that oversees the ERC, confirmed Ferrari had resigned with immediate effect on Tuesday.
“The Commission regrets the resignation of Professor Ferrari at this early stage in his mandate, and at these times of unprecedented crisis in which the role of EU research is key,” the spokesman said in a statement.
In a statement, Ferrari said he had joined the ERC as a “fervent supporter” of the EU, but its handling of coronavirus had changed his mind.
He complained that the strategy he had proposed to fight the virus had been unanimously rejected by the ERC’s scientific council because it went against the agency’s usual way of working.
The ERC, set up in 2007, is the first Europe-wide funding agency for cutting edge research, with a budget of over two billion euros in 2019. — NNN-AGENCIES
