When will COVID-19 end? WHO chief tells

The World Health Organisation head Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on Friday said that he hopes the coronavirus pandemic will be over in less than two years.

"We hope to finish this pandemic (in) less than two years, especially if we can pool our efforts," he said during a press briefing on Friday.

He further described the COVID-19 pandemic as "once-in-a-century health crisis", which was allowed to spread at a rapid pace across the world due to globalisation, but at the same time, the world is more technologically equipped to stop the virus which was not the case a century ago when the Spanish flu wreaked havoc across the world.

Further, WHO's emergencies chief Dr Michael Ryan observed that the Spanish flu spread across the globe in three distinct waves and that the second wave, which started during the fall of 1918, was the most devastating. However, he didn't see any such pattern emerging with this virus.

"This virus is not displaying a similar wave-like pattern," he said.

Ryan said that while pandemic viruses often settle into a seasonal pattern, that didn't appear to be the case for the coronavirus.

The coronavirus pandemic has affected more than 22 million people and killed 7,96,000 people worldwide.