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The UN chief says it’s “very frustrating” that leaders of the 20 major industrialised nations didn’t come together in March and establish a coordinated response to grapple with the coronavirus in all countries as he proposed.
The result, he says, is every country is taking its own, sometimes contradictory, actions and the virus is moving “from east to west, north to south”, with second waves of infections now affecting many countries.
Ahead of the Group of 20 summit next month, Guterres said this in an interview with The Associated Press.
However, he said he hoped the international community now understands “they need to be much more coordinated in fighting the virus.”
Guterres says the United Nations also will be “strongly advocating” during the G-20 summit for a guarantee that when a vaccine is available, “it becomes indeed available and affordable for everyone, everywhere”.
There have so far been 41,640,295 coronavirus cases since they were first reported in China in December last year with 1,136,495 fatalities.
The US is the worst-affected country with 8,406,718 cases and 223,024 deaths.
Currently, there is no vaccine but a number of promising candidates are in the final stage of trials.
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