With the world seeing no clear future under lockdown, many countries are lifting their lockdowns and travel slowly resuming with Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) being opted for instead. The World Health organization (WHO) has come on board too stressing that bans on international travel cannot stay in place indefinitely.
WHO says that instead, countries are going to have to do more to reduce the spread of coronavirus within their borders, as opposed to continued restrictions onto world travel which is greatly affecting economies.
The outburst of new infections has impelled countries to re impose some travel restrictions in recent days, with Britain throwing the reopening of Europe’s tourism industry into disarray by ordering quarantine on travelers returning from Spain.
Recently, while addressing a virtual news briefing in Geneva, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the World Health Organization’s director-general said that only with strict adherence to health measures, from wearing masks to avoiding crowds, would the world manage to beat the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Where these measures are followed, cases go down. Where they are not, cases go up,” he said.
Also commenting at the same sitting, WHO emergencies program head Mike Ryan said it was impossible for countries to keep borders shut for the foreseeable future.
“…It is going to be almost impossible for individual countries to keep their borders shut for the foreseeable future. Economies have to open up, people have to work, trade has to resume,” he said.
“What is clear is pressure on the virus pushes the numbers down. Release that pressure and cases creep back up. The more we understand the disease, the more we have a microscope on the virus, the more precise we can be in surgically removing it from our communities,” he supplemented.
More countries have fully opened their boarders to international travel though airlines still decry a reduction in customers due to the fears in mass travel brought about by the Corona virus.
