Warning that complacency is “one of the greatest dangers we face now”, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus — who earned a doctorate of philosophy in the United Kingdom and has been the current Director-General of the World Health Organization since he was elected to that position on Tuesday, May 23, 2017 — said that “there must be a ‘new normal’ — a world that is healthier, safer and better prepared.”
“The World Will Not and Cannot Go Back to the Way Things Were”, Warns Director-General of World Health Organization
During a media briefing which occurred yesterday, Wednesday, April 22, 2020, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned against easing restrictions of staying in place and relaxing the recommended minimum distance from the nearest person, saying that “we have a long way to go. This virus will be with us for a long time.”
The following six public health measures need to “remain the backbone of the response in all countries”:
- Find every case;
- Isolate every case;
- Test every case;
- Care for every case;
- Trace and quarantine every contact; and
- Educate, engage and empower the people, as the fight cannot be effective without empowering people and without the full participation of our people.
Summary
My personal opinion is based on reading numerous articles from reliable sources — such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the World Health Organization, and The New England Journal of Medicine as three of many examples — and not by the media in general, which has been grossly irresponsible by sensationalizing how the current 2019 Novel Coronavirus pandemic is being reported…
…and that is that people do need to take responsibility of slowing the spread of the virus by properly washing hands on a regular basis — as well as maintaining a minimum distance from the nearest person by staying out of his or her personal space — but I do not agree with people sheltering in place for weeks or months at a time; nor do I agree with other options which may be perceived as unnecessarily restricting the freedoms we are supposed to be enjoying in the United States.
The problem is that the vast majority of people around the world has taken a stance on extreme ends of the spectrum: either stay locked down in place and not see the sun for several decades and tattle on anyone who even thinks of violating that dictum; or spend consecutive days packing hundreds of people in enclosed places — exchanging every bodily fluid possible with each other in an attempt to achieve “herd immunity” against the 2019 Novel Coronavirus — and purposely flout against the government that they have rights and no one can tell them what to do.
I prefer to take the sane ground located somewhere in the middle — based on logic and reliable data. People simply cannot stay locked down in place for months — nor should they be forced to be exposed to the 2019 Novel Coronavirus.
Frankly — other than sheltering in place — I have been doing most of what has been recommended by the aforementioned sources years before the current 2019 Novel Coronavirus pandemic even began; and my stance remains unchanged since I first started reporting on this pandemic.
This article is the latest in a series pertaining to the 2019 Novel Coronavirus — which is also known as COVID-19 or 2019-nCoV or SARS-CoV-2 or HCoV-19 or severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 — pandemic in an effort to get the facts out with information derived from reliable sources…
…as well as attempt to maintain a reasoned and sensible ongoing discussion towards how to resolve this pandemic.
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Photograph ©2020 by Brian Cohen.