The theme of this year’s World TB Day March 24th, 2021, ‘The Clock is Ticking’ (WHO 2021b), conveys the sense of urgency that the world is running out of time to deliver the commitments to end TB made by global leaders at the United Nations General Assembly high level meeting on TB (UNGA, 2018). This theme is particularly appropriate and critical in light of the devastating COVID-19 pandemic which is currently the top killer from an infectious disease globally, with TB now being shifted to second place (WHO 2021a; WHO 2021c). Since the end of December, 2019, when the WHO was made aware of several cases of atypical pneumonia in Wuhan, China, caused by the novel severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), as of March 15th 2021, there have been 119,603,761 confirmed COVID-19 cases, with 2,649,722 deaths, reported to WHO (WHO, 2021c).