2023-05-05 13:28:22
Medical experts from the World Health Organization decided to end the global health emergency caused by COVID-19. The announcement was made this Friday. The pandemic has cost the lives of more than 6.9 million people around the world.
COVID-19 no longer represents a global health emergency, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Friday, an important step toward ending the pandemic that has killed more than 6.9 million people, disrupted the global economy and devastated communities.
The announcement comes a day after WHO medical experts met behind closed doors, something they had been doing every three months, to determine whether or not the health emergency in force since 2020 continued.
“Yesterday, the Emergency Committee met for the fifteenth time and recommended that I declare an end to the public health emergency of international concern. I have accepted that advice. It is therefore with great hope that I declare an end to COVID-19 as a global health emergency,” said WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
He also stated that the experts made the recommendation after “carefully” analyzing the data related to the impact of the virus in the world.
The WHO emergency committee first declared COVID at its highest alert level more than three years ago, on January 30, 2020. The state helps focus international attention on a health threat, plus to strengthen collaboration on vaccines and treatments.
“After more than three years, it is time to confront the COVID-19 pandemic, which has caused so much suffering, with new tools and new ambitions. One of them being preparing for future pandemics,” read the committee’s determination, said Didier Houssin, president of the WHO International Sanitary Regulations.
Over 6.9 million people in the world have died from COVID-19, while the WHO estimates more than 765 million confirmed positive cases.
“For more than a year, the pandemic has been on a downward trend with increasing population immunity from vaccination and infection, (as well as) decreasing mortality and decreasing pressure on health systems. This trend has allowed most countries to go back to living as we knew it before COVID-19,” added Ghebreyesus.
By the end of April, more than 13 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines had been administered worldwide, according to WHO data.
When the WHO declared the health emergency, fewer than 100 cases had been reported outside of China. Three years later, “COVID-19 has changed the world,” said Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
Despite the end of the emergency declaration, the WHO experts stressed that this action “does not mean that COVID-19 ceased to be a global threat.”
“We do not declare when pandemics begin or when pandemics end, epidemiologically that virus will continue to cause waves (of cases). What we are hopeful of is that we have the tools to ensure that these waves do not end in more severe disease,” said Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO lead epidemiologist.
An additional recommendation from the emergency committee, which the WHO director decided to implement, is to establish a review committee to develop long-term standing recommendations for countries on how to manage COVID-19 on an ongoing basis. This would include actions in five core areas: collaborative surveillance, community protection, safe care and scalable access to countermeasures, and emergency coordination.
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