’Because of COVID’: Western experts weigh in on two years of pandemic

On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared a global pandemic. The rapid spread of a novel coronavirus and "alarming levels of inaction" by governments gave cause for grave concern, WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said then. "We cannot say this loudly enough, or clearly enough, or often enough: all countries can still change the course of this pandemic. "If countries detect, test, treat, isolate, trace and mobilize their people in the response, those with a handful of cases can prevent those cases becoming clusters, and those clusters becoming community transmission," he said at the time. And so the phrase, "because of the pandemic," entered our collective lexicon. The global count that day: 18,000 confirmed cases and 4,291 deaths. WHO's latest numbers to date: 446 million confirmed cases and, a new sad milestone this week, more than six million deaths.