The World Health Organization announced, on Friday, that the Covid-19 pandemic may recede this year to the extent that the threat it poses becomes similar to that of seasonal influenza.
The organization expressed its confidence that it will be able to declare an end to the global emergency at some point in 2023, stressing that it is increasingly looking forward to the approaching end of the pandemic phase.
Last weekend marked three years since the World Health Organization described the Covid-19 outbreak as a pandemic, despite the organization’s Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus insisting that countries should have acted several weeks before that declaration.
“I think we’re starting to get to a point where we look at COVID-19 as we look at seasonal flu, as a health hazard and a virus that will continue to claim lives but also a virus that does not disrupt our society,” WHO Emergencies Director Michael Ryan said during a press conference.
“I think it will happen … this year,” he added.
The Director-General of the organization confirmed that the world is in a better place now than ever before during the pandemic.
“I am confident that this year we will be able to say that COVID-19 has ended as a Public Health Emergency of International Concern,” he said.
The World Health Organization declared a public health emergency on January 30, 2020, when fewer than 100 cases of the virus and zero deaths were recorded outside China.