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STORY: WHO / COVID-19 UPDATE
TRT: 5:08
SOURCE: WHO
RESTRICTIONS: NONE
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH / NATS
DATELINE: 15 MAY 2020, GENEVA, SWITZERLAND
FILE – GENEVA, SWITZERLAND
1. Wide shot, WHO headquarters exterior
15 MAY 2020, GENEVA, SWITZERLAND
2. Wide shot, dais
3. SOUNDBITE (English) Tedros Ghebreyesus, Director-General, World Health Organization (WHO):
“This evening, WHO will release a Scientific Brief on Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in Children.
In the past weeks, reports from Europe and North America have described a small number of children being admitted to intensive care units with a multisystem inflammatory condition with some features similar to Kawasaki’s disease and toxic shock syndrome. Initial reports hypothesise that this syndrome may be related to COVID-19.”
4. Wide shot, dais
5. SOUNDBITE (English) Tedros Ghebreyesus, Director-General, World Health Organization (WHO):
“I call on all clinicians worldwide to work with your national authorities and WHO to be on the alert and better understand this syndrome in children.”
6. Wide shot, dais
7. SOUNDBITE (English) Maria Van Kerkhove, Technical Lead COVID-19, Health Emergencies Programme, World Health Organization (WHO):
“And so, we're learning that it seems to be a very rare syndrome, but we need more information and we need more information collected in a systematic way because, in the initial reports, we're getting a description of what this looks like, which is not always the same. And in some children, they've tested positive for COVID-19 but other children have not. So, we don't know if this is associated with COVID-19 or not.”
8. Wide shot, dais
9. SOUNDBITE (English) Michael Ryan, Executive Director, Health Emergencies Programme, World Health Organization (WHO):
“Another, I think important point is, as the number of cases of any particular disease it grows to a very large number, you start to potentially notice much rarer syndromes. So, you may not notice the disease emerge in a small group of 10 or 20,000 cases, but if you get to 90 or a hundred or a million cases, then what is a very rare, potential side effect or consequence of the infection can become apparent. It doesn't mean that the disease is changing. It doesn't mean that the disease is changing in kids. What it means is when you get a very large number of children with the disease, you will see a very rare occurrence happen.”
10. Wide shot, dais
11. SOUNDBITE (English) Michael Ryan, Executive Director, Health Emergencies Programme, World Health Organization (WHO):
“I think it's also important to understand that there are many potential drugs that can kill a virus in a test tube, and that's what we call in vitro. It means that you can actually kill a virus by directly applying the drug to the virus, you can observe how it interferes with the virus function. It's a very different thing to take that drug and then put it into a human. And therefore, the difference between a drugs effect on a virus out of the body. And then that drug's capacity to affect the progress of the virus in the body is very different, and that's why trials are very important.”
12. Wide shot, dais
13. SOUNDBITE (English) Michael Ryan, Executive Director, Health Emergencies Programme, World Health Organization (WHO):
“If we take the case of Yemen there's a very worrying situation emerging in terms of the number of cases in both the North and the South. And WHO has been working very, very hard in Yemen despite these difficulties with our UN partners where we've repurposed 26 EOC across the country, 10 operational in the South, 13 in the North, we've established with the government four COVID hotlines. We've repurposed 300 rapid response teams, which were trained for cholera. We need about a thousand of those teams with two to five staff per team. These are the contact tracing teams, the teams that go out and look for cases and do that public health work we are always talking about.”
14. Wide shot, dais
15. SOUNDBITE (English) Tedros Ghebreyesus, Director-General, World Health Organization (WHO):
“WHO recognizes the wide-ranging efforts and initiatives aimed at incentivizing innovation while also ensuring access for all. These will be important topics next week at the World Health Assembly. At the beginning of the pandemic, President Alvarado asked me to set up a health technology repository for vaccines, medicines, diagnostics and any other tool that may work against COVID-19.”
16. Wide shot, dais
17. SOUNDBITE (English) Carlos Alvarado Quesada, President, Costa Rica
“We want to create, we propose to create a global pool, a repository of intellectual property. And this is with data, with knowledge, technologies, designs regarding COVID-19.”
18. Wide shot, dais
World Health Organization (WHO) officials today (15 May) discussed reports from Europe and North America of children being admitted to intensive care units with a multisystem inflammatory condition with some features similar to Kawasaki’s disease and toxic shock syndrome.
Briefing reporters from Geneva, WHO’s Director-General, Dr. Tedros Ghebreyesus said, “initial reports hypothesise that this syndrome may be related to COVID-19.” He announced that the WHO will release a Scientific Brief on Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in Children today.
Dr. Tedros called on all clinicians worldwide “to work with your national authorities and WHO to be on the alert and better understand this syndrome in children.”
The WHO’s Technical Lead on COVID-19, Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, said “it seems to be a very rare syndrome, but we need more information and we need more information collected in a systematic way because, in the initial reports, we're getting a description of what this looks like, which is not always the same. And in some children, they've tested positive for COVID-19 but other children have not. So, we don't know if this is associated with COVID-19 or not.”
For his part, the WHO’s Health Emergencies Programme Executive Director, Michael Ryan, said “as the number of cases of any particular disease it grows to a very large number, you start to potentially notice much rarer syndromes. So, you may not notice the disease emerge in a small group of 10 or 20,000 cases, but if you get to 90 or a hundred or a million cases, then what is a very rare, potential side effect or consequence of the infection can become apparent. It doesn't mean that the disease is changing. It doesn't mean that the disease is changing in kids. What it means is when you get a very large number of children with the disease, you will see a very rare occurrence happen.”
Turning to potential treatments for COVID-19, Ryan said, “there are many potential drugs that can kill a virus in a test tube, and that's what we call in vitro. It means that you can actually kill a virus by directly applying the drug to the virus, you can observe how it interferes with the virus function. It's a very different thing to take that drug and then put it into a human. And therefore, the difference between a drugs effect on a virus out of the body. And then that drug's capacity to affect the progress of the virus in the body is very different, and that's why trials are very important.”
On the situation in Yemen, Ryan said, “there's a very worrying situation emerging in terms of the number of cases in both the North and the South. And WHO has been working very, very hard in Yemen despite these difficulties with our UN partners where we've repurposed 26 EOC across the country, 10 operational in the South, 13 in the North, we've established with the government four COVID hotlines. We've repurposed 300 rapid response teams, which were trained for cholera. We need about a thousand of those teams with two to five staff per team. These are the contact tracing teams, the teams that go out and look for cases and do that public health work we are always talking about.”
Presidents Carlos Alvarado Quesada of Costa Rica and Sebastián Piñera of Chile joined Dr. Tedros remotely to announce progress on a technology platform that aims to lift access barriers to effective vaccines, medicines and other health products against COVID-19. Costa Rica proposed the idea at the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak and several countries are now backing the proposal.
Dr Tedros said, “WHO recognizes the wide-ranging efforts and initiatives aimed at incentivizing innovation while also ensuring access for all. These will be important topics next week at the World Health Assembly. At the beginning of the pandemic, President Alvarado asked me to set up a health technology repository for vaccines, medicines, diagnostics and any other tool that may work against COVID-19.”
Alvarado said, “we want to create, we propose to create a global pool, a repository of intellectual property. And this is with data, with knowledge, technologies, designs regarding COVID-19.”
According to the latest WHO situation report, there are 4,248,389 confirmed cases of COVID-19 globally, and 292,046 confirmed deaths.
