COVID-19 no longer qualifies as global emergency, WHO said Friday
Posted Date – 11:45 PM, Fri – 5 May 23
Geneva: COVID-19 is no longer a global emergency, the World Health Organization said on Friday, marking a symbolic end to the devastating coronavirus pandemic that triggered once-impossible lockdowns, upended the global economy and At least 7 million people died.
WHO first declared COVID-19 an emergency more than three years ago. Officials at the U.N. health agency said that while the emergency phase was over, the pandemic was not over, noting recent spikes in cases in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. Thousands of people are still dying from the virus every week, the WHO said.
“It is hopeful that I declare COVID-19 a global health emergency,” said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. “This does not mean that COVID-19 is over as a global health threat,” he said, adding, If COVID-19 “puts our world at risk,” he doesn’t hesitate to reconvene experts to reassess the situation. It has been trending downward for more than a year, suggesting that most countries were back to life before COVID-19.
He lamented the damage COVID-19 had done to the international community, saying the virus had destroyed businesses, exacerbated political divisions and impoverished millions. Tedros also noted that at least 20 million people may have died from COVID-19, far more than the 7 million officially reported. “COVID has changed our world and it has changed us,” he said, warning that the risk of new variants remains.
Given the myriad of issues that have weakened the world’s response to COVID-19, it is up to heads of state and other leaders to decide how the health threat should be addressed in the future, said Dr Michael Ryan, WHO’s emergencies chief.
Countries are negotiating a pandemic treaty that some hope will shed light on how the disease threat will be confronted in the future — but any such treaty is unlikely to be legally binding. When the United Nations health agency first declared the coronavirus an international crisis on January 30, in 2020, it hadn’t yet been named COVID-19 and there were no major outbreaks outside China.
More than three years later, the virus has caused an estimated 764 million cases worldwide, with about 5 billion people receiving at least one dose of the vaccine. In the US, the public health emergency declaration for COVID-19 will expire in May and broad measures to support the pandemic response, including vaccine mandates, will end on November 11.
Many other countries, including Germany, France and the United Kingdom, lifted many of their pandemic-specific regulations last year. When Tedros declared COVID-19 an emergency in 2020, he said his greatest fear was the potential for the virus to spread in countries with weak health systems, which he called “underprepared.” The worst COVID-19 death tolls were previously thought to be best prepared for the pandemic, including in the US and UK.
Africa has reported just 3 percent of the global total, according to the World Health Organization. The WHO did not “declare” a pandemic, but first used the term to describe an outbreak in March 2020, when the virus had spread to every continent except Antarctica, long before many other scientists said the pandemic had happened after. The agency, tasked with coordinating the world’s response to serious health threats, has repeatedly faltered as the coronavirus spread.
In January 2020, the WHO publicly praised China for its swift and transparent response, even though minutes of a private meeting obtained by The Associated Press showed senior officials frustrated by China’s lack of cooperation. The WHO also advised the public not to wear face masks against COVID-19 for months, a mistake many health officials said cost lives.
Many scientists have also blasted the WHO for its reluctance to acknowledge that COVID-19 is often airborne and transmitted by asymptomatic people, criticizing the agency for lacking strong guidance to prevent such exposure. Tedros is a strong critic of rich countries hoarding limited supplies of COVID-19 vaccines and has warned the world is on the brink of a “catastrophic moral failure” by failing to share it with poorer countries.
More recently, the WHO has been working to investigate the origins of the coronavirus, a scientifically challenging but also politically contentious endeavor. Following a week-long visit to China, the WHO released a report in 2021 arguing that COVID-19 most likely jumped to humans from animals, calling the possibility of it originating in a laboratory “extremely unlikely” “.
But the UN agency reversed course the following year, saying “critical data” were still missing and it was too early to rule out the possibility that COVID-19 could be linked to the lab. The panel commissioned by the WHO to review its performance criticized China and other countries for not acting faster to stop the virus and said the organization was constrained by limited funding and an inability to force countries to act.
