Lockdown is Not Enough to Stop the Coronavirus - WHO Emergency Executive

The COVID-19 pandemic recently surpassed 300,000 cases, while the death toll is over 13,000. The infection has struck over 120 countries, with the main centres of the outbreak outside China being located in Italy, the United States, Spain, Germany, and Iran.

Current quarantine measures won't be sufficient to stop the pandemic for good, the World Health Organisation's top emergency executive Mike Ryan announced on Sunday.

"What we really need to focus on is finding those who are sick, those who have the virus, and isolate them, find their contacts and isolate them", he said in an interview on the BBC's Andrew Marr Show.

A woman wearing a protective face mask reads a newspaper as she walks in a street on the deserted Ile Saint Louis in Paris as lockdown is imposed to slow the rate of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in France, March 18, 2020.

© REUTERS / CHRISTIAN HARTMANN

"The danger right now with the lockdowns ... if we don't put in place the strong public health measures now, when those movement restrictions and lockdowns are lifted, the danger is the disease will jump back up".

The majority of new cases have been reported in the United States, and in Italy, where the death toll surpassed the number of deceased in China amid a health crisis in Bergamo and other cities. At the same time, among the 300,000 infected almost 100,000 have recovered from the disease. To curb the infection, numerous countries have introduced travel bans, also urging their citizens returning from abroad to quarantine themselves for two weeks.