Dr Mike Ryan, Executive Director of the World Health Organization's Emergencies Programme, has expressed concern that the capacity to detect new variants of Covid-19 quickly has been lost.
He said that at the peak of the pandemic, while health systems may have been under huge pressure, there was a lot of testing and sequencing.
Dr Ryan said that countries had been detecting new variants quite efficiently and characterising them very well. In advance of a University College Cork School of Public Health webinar on 'Covid Now - What Next' today, Dr Ryan said there were signs that things were improving but there were also gaps. "Many people around the world are not protected, there are many systems that are still very weak, we don't know how this virus will continue to evolve," he said.
He cautioned that while people get back to their lives, there needs to be vigilance. He urged governments to make sure they integrate the surveillance and testing, treatment and vaccination programme into the normal health service and continue to deliver them efficiently.