Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO), speaks during a news conference in Geneva, Switzerland, December 20, 2021.
Denis Balibouse | Reuters
The spread of Covid-19 is not any longer a world public health emergency, the World Health Organization declared Friday.
“For greater than a yr, the pandemic has been on a downward trend with population immunity increasing from vaccination and infection, mortality decreasing, and the pressure on health systems easing,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a news conference in Geneva.
“This trend has allowed most countries to return to life as we knew it before Covid-19,” Tedros said. “It’s due to this fact with great hope that I declared Covid-19 over as a world health emergency.”
Nearly 7 million people have died from the virus worldwide for the reason that WHO first declared the emergency on Jan. 30, 2020, in line with the U.N. organization’s official data. Tedros said the true death toll is at the least 20 million.
The WHO’s decision comes because the U.S. is about to finish its national public health emergency on Thursday.
Tedros said there continues to be a risk that latest variant could emerge and cause one other surge in cases. He warned national governments against dismantling the systems they’ve built to fight the virus.
“This virus is here to remain. It’s still killing and it’s still changing,” he said.
However the WHO chief said the time has come for countries to transition from an emergency response to managing Covid like other infectious diseases.
Covid was first observed in Wuhan, China, in December 2019, when several patients began to experience pneumonia symptoms with unknown cause.
Covid moved rapidly across the globe in early 2020 resulting in an unprecedented shutdown of international travel and border closures as countries unsuccessfully tried to stop the spread of the virus.
Covid devastated the elderly and other vulnerable populations and ravaged hospitals that did not have the bed capability or supplies to administer the sudden surge of suffering and death.
Many national governments shut down public life in a desperate effort to stop the death, resulting in a severe economic downturn and social disruption, the long-term consequences of which likely won’t be fully understood for years to return.
“Covid-19 has been so far more than health crisis,” Tedros said. “It has caused severe economic upheaval, erasing trillions from GDP, disrupting travel and trade, shattering businesses and plunging thousands and thousands into poverty,” he said.
“It has caused severe social upheaval with borders closed, movement restricted, schools shut and thousands and thousands of individuals experiencing loneliness, isolation, anxiety and depression,” Tedros said.
China has faced fierce criticism for not alerting the world earlier, an allegation Beijing denies. Critics have also accused the WHO of relying an excessive amount of on information from Beijing on the outset of the pandemic.
Greater than three years later, the origins of the virus are still a hotly contested mystery. Scientists, government officials and most of the people proceed to debate whether Covid spilled over to humans from an infected animal, or leaked from a lab in China.
The U.S. intelligence community is split in its assessment of Covid’s origins.
The U.S. government, allied nations and the WHO have criticized the Chinese government for not providing transparent access to data that might help determine how the pandemic began.
