U.S. "closely tracking" increase of COVID incidents in the South Caucasus

Washington is "closely tracking" the current trend of the COVID-19 outbreak in the South Caucasus region, Gayle Smith, the State Department Coordinator for Global COVID-19 Response and Health Security, told TURAN's Washington correspondent.

All three South Caucasian countries - Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia - as well as Russia and some 75 others, have been included in U.S. CDC's (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) Level 4: COVID-19 Very High warning list, the highest level of advisory, amid a recent spike of COVID-19 cases in the region.

In the meantime, South Caucasus was absent during a virtual COVID-19 Ministerial which was hosted yesterday for the first time by Secretary Anthony Blinken.

In his speech, Blinken called on his counterparts to stand with the U.S. to accelerate the equitable distribution of vaccines worldwide and end this pandemic.  "We've got to be ambitious because ending this pandemic demands it. We've got to be relentless because this pandemic is relentless."

Speaking to reporters following the Ministerial, Coordinator Smith said, there "was a great deal of enthusiasm from ministers all over the world about the meeting itself and an agreement that these consultations should continue."

The State Department is planning to convene another round with foreign ministers before the global presidential summit, which was announced by President Biden in September.

Asked whether the South Caucasus will be invited to the next ministerial, Coordinator Smith told TURAN's Washington correspondent that "it is absolutely our intention – and I think it was very much captured in the spirit of the other attendees – that this obviously needs to expand to include more countries because we're all in this together.  So we anticipate that there will be additional consultations and that they will build out and expand as it rightly should. "

"We look forward to having more countries participate, absolutely," - she added.

When asked about the role for international institutions and civil society to accelerate a regional recovery, Coordinator Smith said "we think civil society has an enormous role to play in multiple ways."

"You mentioned, for example, in some cases there are questions about science, there's misinformation out there, and this disinformation. This came up in the conversations today.  We found all over the world that sometimes the most effective antidote to that is effective interlocutors and, in fact, civil society – that there tends to be a confidence often in civil society organizations and leaders. There's a huge role to play there." -she said.

"We regularly engage with civil society actors here and around the world through our embassies and aid missions, and we fully intend to keep doing that, because we can't succeed, quite frankly, without them" she added.

Alex Raufoglu

Washington D.C.