When Tedros declared COVID-19 to be an emergency in 2020, he said his greatest fear was the virus' potential to spread in countries with weak health systems he described as 'ill-prepared.' Many other countries, including Germany, France and Britain, dropped many of their provisions against the pandemic last year. On this day, wide-ranging measures to support the pandemic response, including vaccine mandates, will end. President Joe Biden ended the Covid national emergency on April 11. In the US, the public health emergency declaration made regarding COVID-19 is set to expire on May 11. More than three years later, the virus has caused an estimated 764million cases globally and about 5billion people have received at least one dose of vaccine. 'However, we are clearly in a different phase of handling COVID-19, the impact of the virus is clearly much less than it was, and the WHO decision is reasonable.' 'Hopefully, the large wave in China at the beginning of the year - precipitated by that country's abrupt exit from their Zero Covid strategy - will be the last event of such magnitude.'ĭr Michael Head, a senior research fellow at the University of Southampton, said: 'One slightly counter-intuitive aspect is that the WHO has downgraded COVID-19 from a public health emergency, yet the sustained multi-country transmission means it still meets most widely used definitions of a 'pandemic'. 'Rather, it is a recognition that we are no longer seeing major surges in infections, severe illness and death. 'The ending of the emergency is emphatically not the end of Covid as a public health problem,' Prof Mark Woolhouse of the University of Edinburgh, in Scotland, said.
However, the WHO leaders now say it is time for countries to treat Covid as they do other infectious diseases. At that point, no major outbreaks had been recorded outside of China. The health agency first declared Covid an international crisis on January 30, 2020. However, a massive Covid surge in China around the new year that triggered fears of a new strain with traits that had never been seen before made them reconsider. Professor Didier Houssin, a WHO member from France, said the agency first considered lifting the emergency in January. It's something we came up with over time,' Dr Maria Van Kerkhove, an American infectious disease specialist at the WHO, said in response to a question about why the agency made this decision so late. The pandemic, which triggered once-unthinkable lockdowns, upended the global economy, and killed at least 7million people across the world.Īt the briefing Friday, Dr Tedros said the pandemic is likely responsible for around 20million deaths - due to reporting issues and testing inconsistencies.
Comment: See: Biden to end COVID-19 vaccination requirement for federal workers, international travelers
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