WHO says it is constantly tracking symptoms to better understand COVID-19

(CNN) – The World Health Organization (WHO) says it is constantly tracking symptoms and dynamics of Covid-19 to better understand this new disease.

Speaking during a Wednesday briefing, Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO technical lead on Covid-19, said a global network of clinicians hold weekly discussions on what they are seeing in their patients.

WHO pools the information and comes up with clinical guidelines “to better understand how to care for people, and to ensure that the clinical pathway that someone goes on — or is part of — in terms of how we care for them is appropriate,” she said.

Van Kerkhove said WHO plans to have an update on its clinical guidance by the end of the week.

Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of WHO’s Health Emergencies Program, said it’s important to carefully track three things in order to better understand the virus — and to help make a vaccine that is the most effective.

“We need to track the infection — the virus itself as it spreads around the world; we need to track its transmission dynamics to ensure that we understand how it’s transmitting, where it’s transmitted,” Ryan said.

“We need to track the genetic sequences of the virus to ensure that the virus is not evolving,” he added.

And lastly, Ryan said, “we also have to track the clinical syndrome, to be able to check whether any changes in the virus are resulting in any differences in the clinical attack rates or clinical fatality or clinical syndromes that are presenting.”

This story was first published on CNN.com, “WHO says it is constantly tracking symptoms to better understand COVID-19”