Director-General of the World Health Organisation (WHO) Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus attends an ACANU briefing on global health issues, including COVID-19 pandemic and war in Ukraine in Geneva, Switzerland, December 14, 2022.Â
Denis Balibouse | Reuters
The World Health Organization on Monday said Covid-19 stays an global health emergency because the world enters the fourth yr of the pandemic.
But WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said he was hopeful that the world will transition out of the emergency phase of the pandemic this yr.
“We remain hopeful that in the approaching yr, the world will transition to a latest phase through which we reduce hospitalizations and deaths to the bottom possible level, and health systems are in a position to manage Covid-19 in an integrated and sustainable way,” Tedros said in an announcement.
The WHO’s emergency committee met on Friday and advised Tedros that the virus, which was initially discovered in Wuhan, China in late 2019, stays a public health emergency of international concern, the U.N. agency’s highest alert level. The WHO first declared an emergency in January 2020.
The WHO decision comes after the U.S. earlier this month prolonged its public health emergency until April.
In his statement Monday, Tedros said the world is in a much better place than it was a yr ago when the omicron variant first swept the globe. The WHO has estimated that a minimum of 90% of the world’s population has some level of immunity to Covid as a consequence of vaccination or infection.
Weekly Covid deaths have dropped 70% because the peak of the primary massive omicron wave in February of last yr, in line with WHO data. But deaths began increasing again in December as China, the world’s most populous country, has faced its largest wave of infection yet.
Tedros on Friday said surveillance and genetic sequencing has declined dramatically, making it difficult to trace Covid variants and detect latest ones. Too few older individuals are fully vaccinated and lots of people don’t have access to antivirals, he said.
“Don’t underestimate this virus,” Tedros told reporters at press conference in Geneva on Friday. “It has and can proceed to surprise us, and it’s going to proceed to kill unless we do more to get health tools to folks that need them and to comprehensively tackle misinformation.”
Last month, the WHO chief said the tip of the emergency phase of the pandemic is closer than ever before. In the autumn, Tedros said the tip of the pandemic was in sight.
“We’ve got never been in a greater position to finish the pandemic. We should not there yet but the tip is in sight,” Tedros told reporters in Geneva last September.
