Geneva - (AFP) - A senior official in the World Health Organization announced Friday that the time has come for a realistic review of the Covid epidemic, after recording one million deaths from the disease this year.

Maria van Kerkhove, head of the WHO's COVID-19 technical team, said the toll was "heartbreaking" because tests, treatments, vaccines and public health measures are all in place to control the virus.

"Since we are in the third year of the outbreak of the epidemic (...) it is even more tragic that we have the tools that can actually prevent these deaths," she added, in a direct dialogue via the social media channels of the World Health Organization.

"Many of us have become numb to numbers," she noted.

"We need a realistic review. We really need to assess where we are now. We shouldn't be in a situation where 14,000 to 15,000 people die every week."

Maria Van Kerkhove stressed that the epidemic is not over yet, but that it can be brought to an end while people continue to live their daily lives.

"We just need to do some extra thinking on that, to be a little bit more careful," she said, adding, "A lot of people talk about living with Covid, but we have to live with it responsibly."

And she warned, "One million deaths this year is not coexistence with Covid, and that we have 15,000 deaths per week is not coexistence with Covid responsibly."

According to the latest statistics of the Health Organization, Covid-19 has claimed 6.45 million lives worldwide since the first infections appeared at the end of 2019 in Wuhan, China.

Last week, more than 5.3 million new infections were reported to the United Nations agency.

"These are huge numbers, and this is an underestimate," Maria Van Kerkhove said, given that home tests are not included in the data.

"We see this virus spreading intensively around the world," she added, expressing her regret that this virus does not leave us.