The World Health Organization has repeated its warnings that as economies and societies open up, countries, communities and individuals must remain vigilant against the coronavirus in order to avoid regression and more outbreaks.
The WHO reported more than 20 million cases and 744,385 deaths worldwide from COVID-19 up to Friday afternoon, including 276,000 new cases and 6,933 new deaths for the latest 24-hour period.
Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO's Health Emergencies Program, said only a very small proportion of the world's population has been exposed to the virus, been infected or developed immunology memory of the novel coronavirus.
"This virus has a long way to burn, if we allow it," he told a virtual news conference from Geneva on Thursday.
He said people should remember that the vast majority of populations remain susceptible to infection.
"Once you get community transmission under control, you get back to clusters and sporadic cases,"Ryan said. "You have to try to keep it there. Because if you take pressure off this virus, it will slip back toward community transmission.
"Once community transmission takes off, establishes itself and becomes intense, then you will have all the consequences of the health system under pressure, death rate rising, hospitalization rising."
Ryan said the key objective is "to try and suppress infections to a point where we have control at community level".
Many European Union member states have witnessed a spike in new cases and deaths in recent weeks.
14-day quarantine list
On Friday, hundreds of thousands of British holidaymakers in France faced the prospect of having to go into self-isolation for 14 days when they return home after the British government reimposed quarantine restrictions on the country following a recent pick-up in coronavirus infections there.
In an announcement late on Thursday, the British government said France is being removed from the list of nations exempted from quarantine requirements because of rising coronavirus infections, which have surged 66 percent this past week. The Netherlands, Malta, Monaco and the Caribbean islands of Aruba and Turks and Caicos are also being added to the quarantine list.
The requirement to spend 14 days in self-isolation will apply to anyone returning to the United Kingdom after 4 am local time on Saturday, a time frame that may prompt many to try to return before then. That could be particularly the case for anyone currently in France, which is the second-most popular holiday destination for British tourists.
Getlink, which operates train services in the Channel Tunnel, warned travelers that they may not be able to get back in time as services are heavily booked.
John Keefe, Getlink's director of public affairs, told the BBC that trains were "already pretty much fully booked" on Friday.
While the number of new infections in Britain is also rising, they are not thought to be increasing at the same pace as in the countries added to the quarantine list. The latest 14-day cumulative figures from the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control show 32.1 COVID-19 cases per 100,000 people in France, compared with 18.5 in the UK.
