Is the COVID-19 pandemic about to officially end?
The World Health Organization, an agency of the United Nations, is ready to consider ending the declaration of a global health emergency issued on January 30, 2020, almost six weeks before declaring COVID-19 a pandemic.
On Friday, a WHO emergency committee will discuss whether to recommend to the agency’s director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, that he lift what is known as the COVID-19 Public Health Emergency of International Concern, according to a STAT report.
But the Boston-based medical journalism publication said ending the emergency order “would not be a declaration that COVID no longer poses a threat to the world, nor would it constitute a declaration by the WHO that the pandemic is over.” ”.
That’s because the WHO has no mechanism to formally declare when a pandemic begins or ends, STAT said, even though Tedros’ March 11, 2020 announcement that COVID-19 was a pandemic is considered a declaration. formal.
“We don’t declare pandemics,” Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s top coronavirus expert, told STAT.
In the United States, President Joe Biden said the COVID-19 pandemic was over during an interview last September. Administration officials later said that Biden was referring to Americans’ attitudes toward the virus and that it remains a serious concern.
Under a treaty of international health regulations, a declaration of a global health emergency gives the WHO the power to issue temporary recommendations to countries, although they are not always followed.
In addition to COVID-19, emergency declarations have been made for a variety of outbreaks around the world, including the H1N1 flu; Ebola, Zika, polio and mpox, formerly called monkeypox. Most of those statements ended once disease transmission largely stopped.
Tedros, who has the final say on what will happen with the COVID-19 global health emergency order, appeared to suggest during the WHO’s weekly press conference on Tuesday that he may not be ready to see it work just yet.
“While I will not preempt the advice of the emergency committee, I remain very concerned about the situation in many countries and the increasing number of deaths,” the director general told reporters.
“While we are clearly in better shape than three years ago when this pandemic first struck, the global collective response is again under pressure,” he said, calling the actual death toll “much higher” than the 170,000 lives that losses were reported worldwide for the past eight weeks.
The world’s most populous country, China, is believed to be underestimating the impact of a massive outbreak of the virus following the government’s recent decision to abruptly abandon strict “zero COVID” policies.
