WHO provides timeline of COVID-19 response for 6 months

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has provided the timeline of COVID-19 response activities for general information from December 2019 when China reported the virus till date.

WHO, in a statement issued from its headquarters in Geneva on Monday, stated that the agency would update the timeline on a regular basis and in light of evolving events and new information.

The timeline covered a media statement issued on the 31st of December, 2019 picked from Wuhan Municipal Health Commission to June 26 when the Access to COVID-19 Tools (ACT) Accelerator was published.

According to WHO, it will continue to provide update on the timeline on a regular basis, unless noted otherwise, country-specific information and data are as reported to WHO by its Member States.

“This timeline supersedes the WHO Rolling Updates and WHO Timeline statement published in April 2020. It is not intended to be exhaustive and does not contain details of every event or WHO activity.’’

It said that as of June 29, the following milestones and events focused on COVID-19 have taken place:

“The Director-General and Executive Director of the WHO Health Emergencies Programme have held 74 media briefings.

“The Director-General’s opening remarks, transcripts, videos and audio recordings for these media briefings are available online.

“There have been 23 Member State Briefings and information sessions.

“EPI-WIN, WHO’s information network for epidemics, has convened 60 technical webinars, making available 287 expert panellists to more than 13,500 participants, from more than 120 countries and territories, with representation from as many as 460 organisations.

“The Information Network for Epidemics (EPI-WIN) seeks to give everyone access to timely, accurate, and easy-to-understand advice and information from trusted sources on public health events and outbreaks: currently the COVID-19 public health emergency.

“The OpenWHO platform has had more than 3.7 million enrolments, about 80 per cent of which are in COVID-19 courses.’’

The UN health agency said free training was available on 13 different topics translated into 31 languages to support the coronavirus response, for a total of 100 COVID-19 courses.

It said that WHO’s landscape of COVID-19 candidate vaccines listed 17 candidate vaccines in clinical evaluation and 132 in preclinical evaluation.

“In addition to the selected guidance included below, all of WHO’s technical guidance on COVID-19 can be found online here.’’ (NAN)