Flight from cities due to COVID-19 short-lived, says flagship UN-Habitat report

A staggering 2.2 billion people already suffer from eye conditions and visual impairment today, but the global need for eye care is set to increase “dramatically”, with lack of exercise a key factor, the UN health agency said on Tuesday, unveiling its first ever report on vision across the world.

Twenty five countries, including some of the world’s biggest economies, have halved their poverty indices, but lack of post-COVID-19 pandemic data obscures the situation facing almost a billion people globally, a new United Nations-University of Oxford study has found. 

Unless there is a “seismic shift” in how countries collectively deal with infectious diseases, future pandemics will emerge more often, spread more rapidly, cause greater damage to the global economy and kill more people than COVID-19, international experts warned in a UN-backed report published on Thursday.