A top WHO official says that mask mandates and social distancing should continue indefinitely in order to protect against new variants of COVID-19.
The comments were made on Sky News by Special Envoy on Covid for the World Health Organisation (WHO). Dr David Nabarro.
Nabarro suggested that there would be a long list of mutations of the Indian variant which would in some cases evade the protection offered by vaccines.
“We will go from Delta to Lambda and then on to the other Greek letters, that’s inevitable, and some of these variants will be troublesome,” he said.
“I’m basically saying variants are going to go on coming. That’s part of life, we need to pick them up fast, we need to move quickly if we see them in a certain location, we need to build the management of variants into what we call our Covid-ready strategy, which is going to be the pattern for the foreseeable future,” he added.
According to Nabarro, mask mandates and social distancing need to remain in place for the foreseeable future “as part of our defence” against COVID, particularly in regions which have high infection rates.
Full story here: WHO Declares Mask And Social Distancing Policies To Continue Indefinitely