World Health Organization (WHO) Regional Director for Europe Hans Kluge praised Russia's fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. He stated this in an interview with TASS.
“Russia has set the highest bar for coordination of measures at all levels: political, technical, epidemiological, social. Another two critical elements were the ability to quickly increase the level of testing, which is indeed very widespread, and the second was the health care system, the rapid growth in the number of hospital beds, ”the WHO spokesman said.
Kluge also praised the measures taken by the Russian authorities to support health workers: in particular, he recalled social insurance for those infected with coronavirus or financial support for the families of deceased doctors.
At the same time, he stressed that both the WHO and different countries could do something better: for example, strengthen the “primary link of the health care system.” “Because we will not be able to win the battle in hospitals, we need to expel this fight from hospitals,” the WHO spokesman said.
On March 18, Kluge said that Russia needs to speed up the release of data on the Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine in order to get it approved as soon as possible. The developers of the Russian drug have submitted applications for vaccine approval both to WHO and the European Medicines Agency (EMA).
