2023-04-18 18:16:09
If the pandemic phase now seems to be fading, the Covid-19 won’t go away. During the first week of May, the World Health Organization (WHO) emergency committee on Covid-19, which meets every three months, will have to decide whether to maintain the maximum alert, a said Dr. Michael Ryan, in charge of the WHO program for the management of health emergencies, during a press conference in Geneva. He said he hoped that on that occasion the committee would have “positive advice” to give to the head of l’OMSle Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus [à qui revient la décision finale]“regarding their assessment of the trajectory of the pandemic and whether or not there is a public health emergency of international concern”.
The WHO had decreed this maximum alert on January 30, 2020 – when the world had less than 100 cases and no deaths outside the Chine. It was not until Dr. Tedros called the situation a pandemic, in March 2020, that the world realized the full extent of the seriousness of the health threat.
Seasonal epidemics
On Tuesday, Dr. Ryan pointed out that “you don’t turn off a switch to automatically go into an endemic situation. It is much more likely that we will move (…) from a bumpy road to a more predictable pattern”. He therefore called for caution in the choice of words. “I think there is a misunderstanding. Very often respiratory viruses, for example, such as flu, do not go through an endemic phase,” he said. “They’re going from a pandemic to very low levels of activity, with potentially seasonal outbreaks or outbreaks that happen on an annual or semi-annual basis,” he explained.
Regarding Covid-19, which is a respiratory virus, the WHO therefore expects it to pass “to a phase of low incidence with potential peaks, in particular when in certain seasons people find themselves outdoors. interior” of homes and buildings due to the cold, added Dr. Ryan. But he insisted the virus itself won’t go away: “We won’t eliminate it and the SARS-CoV-2 virus will join the pantheon of respiratory viruses, like influenza viruses” and “continue to cause serious respiratory diseases. »
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