WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus

Head of WHO overnight dismissed complaints from countries complaining that contact tracing is too difficult to implement as a control strategy for COVID-19 as lame.

The UN health agency has repeatedly advised countries that shutting down their COVID-19 outbreaks requires having a strong contact tracing program in place, a labour-intensive process of tracking down contacts of people with coronavirus to ensure those at risk isolate themselves.

In recent months, countries with large outbreaks of Covid-19, including Britain and the US, have said there are simply too many contacts to trace for an effective system to be put into place.

The World Health Organisation Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said it wasn’t acceptable that some countries claimed there were too many contacts to trace and that the process itself was too difficult.

He has previously praised the contact tracing programs adopted by countries like South Korea, Singapore and China, which involved teams of health workers tracing tens of thousands of people and ensuring that those exposed to the virus were isolated.