Border Closure Won’t Curb Spread Of Coronavirus – WHO

Border closure to prevent the spread of COVID-19 is unsustainable, WHO has said.

The World Health Organization recently urged nations to adopt comprehensive strategies based on local knowledge of where the virus is spreading.

According to Michael Ryan, WHO emergencies director, such measures cannot be kept up indefinitely, and are also only helpful when combined with a large range of other measures to detect and break chains of transmission.

He added that keeping international borders sealed is not necessarily a sustainable strategy for the world’s economy, for the world’s poor, or for anybody else.

His words, “Continuing to keep international borders sealed is not necessarily a sustainable strategy for the world’s economy, for the world’s poor, or for anybody else,”

“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.”

Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s technical lead on COVID-19 added, “What we’re going to have to figure out… is what our new normal looks like?”

“Our new normal includes physical distancing from others, (and) wearing masks where appropriate,”

“Our new normal includes us knowing where this virus is each and every day, where we live, where we work, where we want to travel.”

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Coronaviruses are a group of related viruses that cause diseases in mammals and birds. In humans, coronaviruses cause respiratory tract infections that can be mild, such as some cases of the common cold (among other possible causes, predominantly rhinoviruses), and others that can be lethal, such as SARS, MERS, and COVID-19. Symptoms in other species vary: in chickens, they cause an upper respiratory tract disease, while in cows and pigs they cause diarrhea. There are yet to be vaccines or antiviral drugs to prevent or treat human coronavirus infections.

Coronaviruses constitute the subfamily Orthocoronavirinae, in the family Coronaviridae, order Nidovirales, and realm Riboviria. They are enveloped viruses with a positive-sense single-stranded RNA genome and a nucleocapsid of helical symmetry. The genome size of coronaviruses ranges from approximately 27 to 34 kilobases, the largest among known RNA viruses. The name coronavirus is derived from the Latin corona, meaning “crown” or “halo”, which refers to the characteristic appearance reminiscent of a crown or a solar corona around the virions (virus particles) when viewed under two-dimensional transmission electron microscopy, due to the surface covering in club-shaped protein spikes.

Human coronaviruses were first discovered in the late 1960s. The earliest ones discovered were an infectious bronchitis virus in chickens and two in human patients with the common cold (later named human coronavirus 229E and human coronavirus OC43). Other members of this family have since been identified, including SARS-CoV in 2003, HCoV NL63 in 2004, HKU1 in 2005, MERS-CoV in 2012, and SARS-CoV-2 (formerly known as 2019-nCoV) in 2019. Most of these have involved serious respiratory tract infections.