The COVID-19 pandemic stays a public health emergency of international concern, the World Health Organization said on Monday, citing increasing coronavirus deaths globally.
“As we enter the fourth 12 months of the pandemic, there isn’t a doubt we’re in a much better situation now than we were a 12 months ago, when the omicron wave was at its peak,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said. “But because the starting of December, weekly reported deaths have been rising. Previously eight weeks, greater than 170,000 people have lost their lives to COVID-19. And that’s just the reported deaths; we all know the actual number is way higher.”
The choice was widely expected given the newest COVID-19 surge in China, which experts imagine to be drastically undercounted.
Still, the organization said in a press release that the pandemic is probably going at a “transition point.”
“We remain hopeful that in the approaching 12 months, the world will transition to a latest phase wherein we reduce hospitalizations and deaths to the bottom possible level, and health systems are capable of manage COVID-19 in an integrated and sustainable way,” Tedros said on Monday.
While WHO continues to induce that the pandemic is not over, Tedros has said that the tip is in sight.
The organization’s committee on the pandemic’s emergency status advised WHO to “develop a proposal for alternative mechanisms to take care of the worldwide and national concentrate on COVID-19 after the [public health emergency of international concern] is terminated.”
WHO doesn’t determine whether an outbreak is a pandemic or not. As a substitute, it decides if events are a public health emergency of international concern, which it declared for COVID-19 in January 2020.
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