Read why WHO said Covid-19 is no more global pandemic
The World Health Organisation declared COVID-19 no longer a global emergency on Friday, effectively ending the horrific coronavirus pandemic that caused previously unthinkable lockdowns, upended economies globally, and killed at least 7 million people.
The WHO says that, while the emergency phase has ended, the pandemic has not, noting recent surges of Covid cases in Southeast Asia and the Middle East.
According to the United Nations, hundreds of people die each week due to the illness.
“It is with great hope that I declare COVID-19 a global health emergency,” stated WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
“That does not mean COVID-19 is no longer a global health threat,” he stated, adding that he would assemble experts again to examine if COVID-19 “puts our world in danger.”
Tedros stated that the epidemic has declined for over a year and that most countries had already returned to normalcy before COVID-19.
He mourned the worldwide community’s devastation caused by COVID-19, claiming that the virus had destroyed enterprises and driven millions into poverty.
“COVID has changed our world, and also it has changed us,” he said, cautioning that the potential of new mutations remained.
On January 30, 2020, the United Nations Health Organisation designated the coronavirus an international crisis because it had not yet been identified as COVID-19, and there were no substantial outbreaks outside of China.
More than 3 years later, the virus has caused an estimated 764 million infections worldwide, and almost 5 billion people have gotten at least one dose of vaccine.
The public health emergency declaration issued in response to COVID-19 is expected to expire on May 11, when wide-ranging pandemic response measures, including vaccine mandates, would be phased out.
Many other countries, like Germany, France, and the United Kingdom, abandoned their pandemic preparedness measures last year.
When Tedros declared COVID-19 an emergency in 2020, he expressed concern about the virus’s ability to spread in countries with inadequate health systems that he described as “ill-prepared.”
Some countries with the highest COVID-19 death rates were previously deemed the best prepared for a pandemic, including the United States and the United Kingdom.
According to WHO statistics, the number of reported deaths in Africa accounts for only 3% of the global total.
After assembling an expert committee on Thursday, WHO decided to drop its highest level of alert on Friday.
The United Nations does not “declare” pandemics but adopted the phrase for the first time to characterize the outbreak in March 2020, when the virus had spread to all continents except Antarctica, long after many other scientists had already declared a pandemic.
The WHO is the organization tasked with coordinating the global response to acute health risks, but it frequently faltered as the coronavirus emerged.
In January 2020, WHO publicly praised China for its ostensibly quick and transparent response, although recordings of private sessions acquired by The Associated Press revealed top officials were dissatisfied with China’s lack of collaboration.
WHO also advised avoiding using masks to defend against COVID-19 for months, a blunder many health officials think lost lives.
Numerous scientists also criticized WHO’s refusal to accept that COVID-19 was regularly disseminated in the air and by persons who did not have symptoms, as well as the agency’s lack of robust advice to prevent such exposure.
Tedros was a harsh critic of wealthier countries who hoarded the limited supplies of COVID-19 vaccines, saying that the world was on the verge of a “catastrophic moral failure” if injections were not shared with poor countries.
Recently, WHO has been grappling with the origins of the coronavirus, a difficult scientific endeavour that has also grown politically charged.
Following a weeks-long visit to China, WHO issued a study in 2021 saying that COVID-19 most likely jumped into people from animals, dismissing the likelihood of it starting in a lab as “extremely unlikely.”
However, the UN agency reversed its position the following year, claiming that “key pieces of data” were still missing and also that it was premature to rule out the possibility that COVID-19 was linked to a lab.
A WHO-commissioned panel that reviewed the organization’s performance chastised China and other countries for not moving faster to stop the epidemic and claimed the organization was bound by its low budget and inability to compel governments to act.
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