Dr. Michael Ryan with the World Health Organization says there are significant headwinds and challenges to ensure scaled up production of a COVID-19 vaccine ensures as many people as possible around the world has access to the vaccine.
And the Executive Director of the W-H-O Health Emergencies Programme says there is not a mechanism, as it presently stands, that is going to supply vaccine for everybody on the planet. Dr. Ryan points out first and foremost they have to get the maximum number of candidate vaccines through the system and the second part of that is getting to a point of scaled up production. Dr. Ryan says they will have to prioritize who gets vaccine, at the beginning, depending on which vaccine becomes available.
At the Monday briefing from the World Health Organization the emphasis was placed on contact tracing which can prevent individual cases from becoming clusters and stop it from becoming community transmission. The WHO stresses that contact tracing is what allows countries to stay on the road to economic recovery and it is the bedrock of the outbreak response.
The World Health Organization’s Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove says says the WHO is hearing now about countries which are instituting the use of masks in shops or while using public transit, for example. She says the WHO has always supported the use of masks as part of a comprehensive strategy in combating COVID-19 but is emphatic about it only being just one of the tools.
“However, it is not a substitute for other public health measures that must also be in place. You cannot substitute the use of a mask for hand hygiene – for cleaning your hands. You cannot substitute use of a mask for physical distancing. You cannot substitute use of a mask for testing, for finding cases, for contact tracing, for quarantining cases, so all of this has to be done together.”
Walmart Canada strongly recommends both its associates and employees as well as customers wear masks. CJWW News asked the company if it was making masks a must. Walmart Canada says it has only made masks a requirement in jurisdictions which have passed mandatory orders requiring masks.
