'This is not the last pandemic': WHO chief urges countries to be prepared for another

World Health Organisation (WHO) chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on September 7 said that the world should prepare itself for another pandemic like COVID-19 and also appealed all countries to be better prepared this time. He urged the countries to invest in public health facilities. As per the Reuters tally, over 27.19 million people have been affected by COVID-19 and over 888.326 people have died. The first COVID-19 positive case was recorded in Wuhan, China in December 2019. 

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WHO's Chief: Be better prepared next time

"This will not be the last pandemic," Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said during a news briefing in Geneva. 
"History teaches us that outbreaks and pandemics are a fact of life. But when the next pandemic comes, the world must be ready – more ready than it was this time," he added.

World Health Organisation spokeswoman said that vaccine for the pandemic COVID-19 is not expected until the middle of next year. While addressing a UN briefing in Geneva on Friday, WHO's spokeswoman Margret Harris told: "We are really not expecting to see widespread vaccination until the middle of next year."

"This phase 3 must take longer because we need to see how truly protective the vaccine is and we also need to see how safe it is," she added.

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The delay in the COVID-19 vaccine is because all the data from trails have to be shared and compared to each other. Harris said,  "A lot of people have been vaccinated and what we don't know is whether the vaccine works...at this stage, we do not have the clear signal of whether or not it has the level of worthwhile efficacy and safety."

A global vaccine alliance allocation program known as COVAX has been set up by the World Health Organisation and GAVI to distribute the shots of the vaccine equally across the world after it's prepared. The focus is to vaccinate the high-risk people in every country, for instance - healthcare workers, first.

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India's COVID-19 tally 

The total number of positive COVID-19 cases in India continues to surge globally. So far, India has recorded 42,04,613 COVID-19 cases out of which 71,642 people have died. As per the latest COVID-19 reports by MOHFW, in the past 24 hours, 90,802 new cases and 1,016 deaths have been reported. Currently, the total number of active cases in the country are 8,82,542 and 32,50,429 people have recovered. 

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