After supporting coronavirus lockdowns for months, the WHO just made the reversal of the year

[Andy Meek]

• After months of warning of the necessity of coronavirus lockdowns as a means of getting the COVID-19 pandemic under control, the World Health Organization has apparently had a change of heart.
• Lockdowns, one WHO official said in a recent interview, have done incalculable damage on their own and should really be avoided.
• The right way to combat the coronavirus pandemic, this interview continued, is a target mix of measures that include individual behaviors like mask-wearing and social-distancing.

As recently as July, the World Health Organization was still scaring people around the world -- who'd either just started coming out of months-long, localized coronavirus lockdowns or whose communities were about to clamp down for the first time -- by saying that "total lockdown" might be needed to nip the COVID-19 pandemic in the bud in some places.

Dr. Michael Ryan, executive director of WHO's Health Emergencies Program, said as much during a press conference in early July. "We all want to avoid whole countries going back into total lockdown," he said. "That is not a desire that anybody has. But there may be situations in which that is the only option." The WHO was warning countries at that point that they should only very "slowly" come out of any coronavirus lockdown they'd imposed, and that every nation around the world needed to answer the "fundamental question" for itself as to when and how (and whether) there might be a need for another future lockdown period. "Once lockdowns were ended, there was always the risk that the disease could bounce back," Ryan continued during the press conference.

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After supporting coronavirus lockdowns for months, the WHO just made the reversal of the year originally appeared on BGR.com on Sun, 11 Oct 2020 at 23:02:40 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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