PAHO: Beware of lifting covid19 measures

Pan-American Health Organisation (PAHO) director Dr Carissa Etienne has said lifting or softening containment measures for covid19 should be done with extreme caution, as doing this too soon could lead to a second wave of the virus.

Etienne said decisions to lift social distancing should always be informed by the disease transmission patterns, covid19 testing, contact tracing capacity, the availability of hospital beds, and other objective criteria. She said surveillance must be strengthened to ensure adequate monitoring of these criteria.

Social distancing needs to be accompanied by comprehensive social support measures, she said, to ensure that the most vulnerable can comply without severe risk to their livelihoods, which is extremely difficult in some countries.

She said this would require adequate national and local logistical capacity to ensure the delivery of medicines, tests, food, and other supplies for populations.

Etienne said while she understood that implementing the measures required to stop covid19 can be very disruptive, failure to do so will risk prolonging the crisis and extending the suffering and the socio-economic uncertainty. She urged countries where numbers of new cases are declining to find, test, isolate and treat all cases to ensure the declines continue and further spread is contained.