The head of emergencies at the World Health Organization (WHO) said Tuesday that the worst of the coronavirus pandemic - deaths, hospitalisations and lockdowns - could be over this year if huge inequities in vaccinations and medicines are addressed quickly.

Dr Michael Ryan, speaking during a panel discussion on vaccine equity hosted by the World Economic Forum, said, "we may never end the virus" because such pandemic viruses "end up becoming part of the ecosystem."

But "we have a chance to end the public health emergency this year if we do the things that we've been talking about," he said.

WHO has slammed the imbalance in COVID-19 vaccination between rich and poor countries as a catastrophic moral failure. Fewer than 10% of people in lower-income countries have received one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine.

Ryan told the virtual gathering of world and business leaders that if vaccines and other tools aren't shared fairly, the tragedy of the virus, which has so far killed more than 5.5 million people worldwide, would continue.

"What we need to do is get too low levels of disease incidence with maximum vaccination of our populations, so nobody has to die," Ryan said.

"The issue is: It's the death. It's the hospitalizations. It's the disruption of our social, economic, political systems that's caused the tragedy, not the virus."

Ryan also waded into the growing debate about whether COVID-19 should be considered endemic, a label some countries like Spain have called for to help better live with the virus, or still a pandemic involving intensified measures that many countries have taken to fight the spread.

"Endemic malaria kills hundreds of thousands of people; endemic HIV; endemic violence in our inner cities. Endemic in itself does not mean good. Endemic just means it's here forever," he said.

Public health officials have warned it is highly unlikely COVID-19 will be eliminated and say it will continue to kill people, though at much lower levels, even after it becomes endemic.

Omicron travelled on parcel from Canada and infected person in Beijing, claims China

China has traced a single case of COVID-19 infection caused by the Omicron variant as having arrived on an international document from Canada. As per the country’s health authorities quoted by a Chinese national daily, the Omicron case was found to be a strain similar to those from North America and Singapore.

The authorities said that Omicron variant was detected on the outer package, internal surface and papers of the mail.

The patient who was found with Omicron on January 15 had received an international mail on January 11 which was sent from Canada on January 7, transferred via the US and China`s Hong Kong region to Beijing.

Combined with the epidemiological studies, the testing results of suspicious samples and the gene sequencing result of the case, the possibility that the Beijing case was infected by the virus through the international mail cannot be ruled out, the Global Times quoted Pang Xinghuo, deputy director of the Beijing centre for disease control and prevention, as saying to reporters.

The Omicron strain of the patient in Beijing is similar to those of North America and Singapore in December 2021, Pang said.

The Beijing health authorities ruled out the possibility that the case has any relation with Omicron-infected outbreaks in other Chinese cities.

The patient only had contact with the outer package of the document and the front page of the document inside the mail. She did not touch the internal surface of the mail or other papers.

Testing results on 22 samples relating to the mail showed Omicron was detected in two samples of the outer surface of the mail package, two samples of internal surface of the package as well as eight samples of the paper inside, the report said.

Previously, China reported multiple outbreaks in relation to imported goods.The Covid-19 virus can survive for a long time in low temperature, thus the risk of goods causing the viral transmission increases in winter, Pang said, suggesting people reduce purchasing overseas commodities as the epidemic overseas is rampant.