All In-person Meetings At UN HQ Canceled After Coronavirus Outbreak

UNITED NATIONS, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 27th Oct, 2020 ) :All in-person meetings at United Nations headquarters in New York have been canceled after five personnel of a member state's mission tested positive for the coronavirus, the spokesman for the General Assembly President, Volvcan Bozkir, has said.

The meetings were being canceled on the advice of the UN's Medical Unit pending contact tracing, Spokesman Brendan Varma said Monday night.

The affected mission was not mentioned in a notification sent by the 193-member assembly's president to the member states, but reports suggest the outbreak occurred at Niger's mission.

Varma said the decision was taken in consultation with the chairpersons of the main committees in light of the need to safeguard public health.� After a near-total shutdown of in-person meetings since March, the General Assembly resumed them last month with strict health guidelines that permitted only one delegate per country in the Assembly chamber with social distancing.

The annual high-level meeting of the General Assembly at which heads of government and state participate was held virtually with pre-recorded speeches last month, the first time in-person attendance at the meeting with abandoned in the UN's 75-year history.

The UN secretariat, which went into near-total lockdown when the pandemic hit New York, has slowly been allowing staff back in, reaching the level of Phase-Two which permits up to 40 per cent of the staff into the 39-storey building.

New York City has seen a resurgence of coronavirus in some pockets leading to the state bringing back some of the restrictions that had been relaxed in those localities.