COVID-19 is the ‘worst global health emergency’ WHO has declared

COVID-19 easily ranks as the worst global health emergency that the WHO has ever faced, Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said today, Reuters reports.

And Latin America is now the worst-impacted region; it shot past the US and Canada yesterday with 4,327,160 cases, Reuters reports. Infections are surging in Mexico, Peru, Colombia, Argentina, and Brazil.

Brazil alone now has more than 2 million cases.

In a must-see New York Times photo essay, Tyler Hicks captures the virus’s devastating impact on the Amazon region’s indigenous people, who are ~6X as likely to be infected with the coronavirus as white people.

Many live along the Amazon River—revered as South America’s “essential life source”—yet “once again, in a painful echo of history, it is also bringing disease,” write Julie Turkewitz and Manuela Andreoni.

The Amazon River appears impenetrable and remote, but that’s deceptive, says Tatiana Schor, a Brazilian geography professor.

“There is no such thing as isolated communities in the Amazon,” she said, “and the virus has shown that.”

Courtesy: Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health