Pandemic is far from over: WHO

London: The coronavirus pandemic is not even close to being over, said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus while adding that about 1,80,000 people worldwide have tested positive in the last 24 hours.

"The reality is this is not close to being over... Globally, the pandemic is actually speeding up," Tedros said.

He said, "For many of our countries to really not hunt down this virus is our failure in contact tracing, because we have lame excuses, saying it's too many and it's too difficult to trace."

Tedros also said that the WHO would be sending a team to Wuhan next week to investigate the potential animal source of the new coronavirus.

Meanwhile, a combination of antiviral drugs commonly used to treat HIV showed no beneficial effects in patients hospitalised with Covid-19 in a large-scale randomised trial, scientists in the UK have found.

The findings "convincingly rule out any meaningful mortality benefit of lopinavir-ritonavir in the hospitalised COVID-19 patients we studied," the scientists running the RECOVERY trial at the University of Oxford said in a statement on Monday.

In March, the RECOVERY trial was established as a randomised clinical trial to test a range of potential treatments for COVID-19, including lopinavir-ritonavir, an antiviral treatment commonly used to treat HIV.

Over 11,800 patients have been enrolled from 176 NHS hospitals in the UK for the trial.