WHO official: I would rather be in a COVID-19 clearance environment

Geneva, January 18 (Xinhua) -- In response to the new crown clearance strategy, Michael Ryan, executive director of the World Health Organization's health emergency program, said at the WHO press conference on the 18th that it must be cautious when comparing different epidemic response strategies, and the strategy adopted by a country is based on the epidemic situation that the country is experiencing. Personally, he prefers to be in an environment where the new crown is zero.

Ryan believes that caution must be exercised when comparing different outbreak response strategies, and it is difficult to simply judge right from wrong, because many times the initial situation of the pandemic outbreak limits the opportunity for countries to adopt what kind of response strategies. For example, many Asian countries have taken very positive steps at the outset to keep the number of cases at a very low level. Therefore, such countries have the opportunity to implement zero clearance strategies because the epidemic is well controlled.

Ryan said that some people may say that countries that implement zero-zero strategies now have a risk of virus transmission due to factors such as the large number of susceptible people. But Ryan said he prefers to be in an environment where "if I were a country, I would like to be in that kind of country."

He argues that countries that have successfully kept outbreaks low have both protected their people and increased vaccination levels, and it is now more important to continue to push for vaccination.

He noted that the zero-out strategy focuses primarily on maximizing the spread of the virus, protecting people through vaccination, strengthening surveillance networks and flexible systems of public health and social measures, minimizing COVID-19 transmission through dynamic and flexible responses, and using vaccination to fill immunization gaps in populations.

Ryan stressed: "I would say that your strategic and tactical choices in any crisis depend a lot on the situation you are in. Some countries make very good choices, while others don't. (End)