2023-05-05 14:35:23
COVID-19 is now sufficiently under control to lift the maximum level of alert, the World Health Organization (WHO) decided on Thursday, after more than three years of a pandemic which claimed “at least 20 million” deaths, undermined the global economy and further widened the inequality gap
“It is with great hope that I declare that COVID-19 is no longer a health emergency of international concern,” said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, saying that this disease had caused “ at least 20 million “deaths, almost three times more than the previous official toll of his organization.
As of May 3, the WHO dashboard showed just under seven million officially recorded deaths.
The experts consulted by the Director General judged that “it was time to move on to long-term management of the COVID-19 pandemic” despite the uncertainties that remain on the evolution of the virus.
At the beginning
The organization’s highest level of alert was declared on January 30, 2020, just a few weeks after the detection in China of the first cases of this new viral respiratory disease against which there was then no specific treatment.
But it was not until the head of the WHO spoke of a pandemic in March 2020 that States and populations became aware of the seriousness of the situation and that sometimes very restrictive health measures – up to long months of confinement – are put in place.
SARS-CoV-2 had by then already well started its deadly journey which would see it emerge very quickly around the world.
The fight against the pandemic was invented gradually, often in disorder, as illustrated by the chaotic management in the United States during the presidency of Donald Trump, often deaf to scientific recommendations.
The pandemic today
While the number of newly recorded deaths from COVID-19 has fallen by 95% since January, 16,000 still died from the disease between the end of March and the end of April due to the virus, according to WHO statistics.
Yet in many countries the pandemic has faded into the background. Screening and health monitoring are reduced to the minimum portion. A disarmament deemed premature by the WHO.
The crisis phase “has passed, but not COVID”, thus warned Friday Maria Van Kerkhove, who managed the fight against COVID-19 within this organization, calling not to “let our guard down”.
Vaccines in record time
The vaccines – which appeared in record time at the end of 2020 – nevertheless remain effective against the most severe forms of the disease despite the countless mutations of the original virus.
Undeniable scientific success, vaccines, in particular those with messenger RNA, implemented for the first time, were first monopolized by the countries which had the means to pay the high price, leaving the others on the floor for very long months.
As of April 30, more than 13.3 billion doses of vaccines had been injected.
Antivaccines have also mobilized en masse and cast suspicion on vaccination in general, supported by massive disinformation campaigns on social networks.
Inequality
Economic inequalities and access to care have been brutally exposed. The long queues of Brazilians with huge oxygen cylinders to save a loved one from asphyxiation marked, like the images of the countless pyres in India to burn the bodies.
If in many countries the pandemic now looks like background noise, new variants continue to appear and threaten to restart the infernal machine.
“The virus continues to mutate and it is still capable of causing new waves of contamination and death”, recently underlined the boss of the WHO.
He also drew attention to the ravages of long-lasting COVID, which results in a wide range of more or less disabling symptoms.
According to him, one in 10 infections results in long-lasting COVID, suggesting that hundreds of millions of people could be in need of long-term care, the scale and economic and psychological cost of which are still very poorly understood.
Avoid the next disaster
The world is now looking for the best way to avoid the next health catastrophe.
But the international community has not yet been able to determine with certainty how this virus had mutated into a form that can be transmitted between humans.
If, a priori, the first cases were detected at the end of 2019 in Wuhan in China, two theories clash: leak from a laboratory in the city where these viruses were studied or intermediate animal having infected people who frequented a local market.
This last theory seems for the moment favored by the majority of the scientific community, but the obstruction of the Chinese authorities prevents progress in the investigation into the origins.
At the WHO, member countries have also begun to discuss a future binding agreement that would better nip the next pandemic in the bud and avoid repeating the same mistakes.
The question is not if, but when it will happen.
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