Head of WHO hopes COVID-19 will be gone in at least two years

Head of the World Health Organization (WHO) hopes COVID-19 will be over in less than two years.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus spoke in Geneva yesterday, and he mentioned that current advances in technology could help to get rid of the virus in a shorter time.

Looking back through history, many pandemics have swept across the world, leaving various amounts of casualties and impacts along the way.

In the Plague of Athens in 430 B.C., 100,000 lives were lost in Greece's capital, and the epidemic took five years to get over.

In 1918, Spanish Flu took two years to be diminished and took an estimated 20-50 million lives.

Currently, COVID-19 has killed nearly 800,000 people, and it is thought that another 22.7 million have been infected with the virus.

Also on Friday, it was stated that the scale of the COVID-19 in Mexico was under-recognised, according to WHO's head of health emergencies programme, Dr Mike Ryan.

Compared to the US, Mexico has been severely under testing their population despite them having the third-highest deaths in the world.

US figures show that around 150 people per 100,000 get tested for the virus, compared to about 3 in 100,000 for Mexico.

Friday also brought waves of high numbers of new cases for several countries.

• South Korean has had its highest number of cases record in a day since March - 324 new cases were announced.

• Poland has set a new record for daily infections with a reported 903 new cases announced yesterday.

• Slovakia has also set a new record for daily cases with 123 infections recorded.