“Tragically, 129,344 people in Europe have now lost their lives. My thoughts and deepest sympathy are with the families and loved ones of those we have lost,” Kluge said.
“Every country is mapping out its route to a new normal, and every country is at a different place,” he said.
Kluge called on countries to prolong strategies to curb the spread of the virus.
“We must maintain the full arsenal of measures we have to suppress transmission,” Kluge said, adding, “COVID-19 is not going away any time soon.”
The WHO official’s remarks echo a warning by America’s top infectious disease expert and member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, Dr. Anthony Fauci, who said the virus is unlikely to disappear anytime soon.
“In my mind, it’s inevitable that we will have a return of the virus or maybe it never went away,” he added.
Key to keeping the death count down in the United States as states begin to lift lockdowns and reopen economies are COVID-19 testing, isolating the sick, and contact tracing.
“If by that time we have put into place all of the countermeasures that you need to address this, we should do reasonably well,” Fauci said. “If we don’t do that successfully, we could be in for a bad fall and a bad winter.”
Speaking at a White House briefing on April 22, Fauci described what he said was a “successful formula” for containment and mitigation.
“We were starting to see some turnaround, some flattening, and some coming down,” he said of infection and death counts nationwide.
“So what has happened is that the mitigation that we put in with the first 15 days and then the 30-day mitigation program of physical distancing worked,” he said. “So it got us to where we are today. It is a successful formula. It is the basis for our being able to say that we can now think seriously about reopening America.”
“There are certain checkpoints before you can even think about going into a phase one, and then things relax a little as you go into phase two, and relax a little and you go into phase three,” he said, speaking of conditions outlined in the administration’s plan for a phased approach to reopening.
“Although I know one has the need to leapfrog over things, don’t do that. Do it in a measured way. This is a successful formula. The problem is if we don’t do that, there is a likelihood that we'll have a rebound,” Fauci said.