India’s Situation ‘Beyond Heartbreaking’, Says WHO Chief

Picture courtesy: UICC

New Delhi: The situation in India, where cases of COVID-19 soared drastically, is “beyond heartbreaking”, and the World Health Organization (WHO) is assisting with extra staff and supplies to help them fight the pandemic, WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Monday.

“WHO is doing everything we can, providing critical equipment and supplies, including thousands of oxygen concentrators, prefabricated mobile field hospitals and laboratory supplies,” Tedros was quoted as saying in a briefing by news agency Reuters.

As many as 2,600 staff members have been redeployed from other programmes by the WHO to help India continue fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The exponential growth that we have seen in case numbers is really, truly astonishing,” WHO technical lead on COVID-19, Maria van Kerkhove said in the news conference.

“We have seen similar trajectories of increases in transmission in a number of countries, it has not been at the same scale and it has not had the same level of impact of burden on the healthcare system that we have seen in India,” she said.

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