GENEVA, April 23. /TASS/. All nations should exercise extreme caution while re-opening their borders when the novel coronavirus pandemic begins to subside, said Michael Ryan, the executive director of the World Health Organization (WHO) Health Emergencies Programme.
"When we talk about opening up and reducing lockdowns, there’s also the question of how people begin to move internationally," he said.
"Obviously, they need to move between countries, and it’s going to become more and more of an issue and more and more of a challenge. So I think the issue of moving citizens home or just getting people back into international travel is going to have to be approached carefully and is going to have to be done, I would suspect, first at the sub-regional level," the WHO official continued.
"Already countries are looking at how we can re-establish the movement. Some of that would be based, I think, on risk equalization and response equalization: where countries have a similar control of the disease, where countries have confidence in the measures being implemented in the other country, then, in fact, the risks are equalized and the movement of people between those areas, in a sense, does not add risk to the other country," he went on.
"So I think a lot of the initial work that is going on is at sub-regional and regional level, and then, opening up global travel, again, is going to require careful risk management adjustments by everyone," Ryan said.
In late December 2019, Chinese officials notified the World Health Organization (WHO) about the outbreak of a previously unknown pneumonia in the city of Wuhan, in central China. Since then, cases of the novel coronavirus - named COVID-19 by the WHO - have been reported in every corner of the globe.
According to the latest statistics, over 2,500,000 people have been infected worldwide and more than 177,000 deaths have been reported. In addition, so far, over 696,000 individuals have recovered from the illness across the globe.