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The World Health Organization announced on Friday that it will end the emergency declared for Covid-19 more than three years ago, a milestone in the history of the pandemic that has killed millions of people around the world and disrupted daily life in an unimaginable way before. manner.
“It is with great anticipation that I announce the end of Covid-19 as a global health emergency,” said WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
But WHO officials warned that the decision to lift the emergency did not signal a pandemic, and countries were careful not to consider this as an excuse to dismantle the Covid response system. Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s technical lead on Covid, said the organization wanted to be clear about how people would think about the pandemic.
“The emergency phase is over, but Covid is not yet,” he said.
Indeed, in practical terms, the decision to end the emergency has not changed. Many countries have ended their own states of emergency for Covid, and have moved away from almost all public health restrictions imposed to control the virus. The United States will lift the Covid emergency on May 11. But the WHO’s designation – officially called a “public health emergency of international concern” – is an important moment in humanity’s evolving relationship with the novel coronavirus.
Dr K. Srinath Reddy, who led the Public Health Foundation of India through the pandemic, said the decision to lift the emergency was appropriate, given the high level of global immunity to Covid, caused by vaccination or infection, or both.
“There is no equal danger,” he said, adding that Covid “has achieved a level of equilibrium, a certain type of coexistence with the human host.”
Dr Reddy said the end of the state of emergency should also be appreciated as a moment of human achievement and a “celebration of science.”
“It is important to understand that what made the virus change its character is not only evolutionary biology,” he said, “but also the fact that we have caused it to become less virulent, with vaccinations, with masks, by some public health measures.”
Globally, there have been 765,222,932 confirmed cases of Covid, including 6,921,614 deaths, reported to the WHO as of May 3. “We know the true toll is many times higher, at least 20 million,” Dr Tedros said.
A year ago, the WHO said that 15 million more people died in the first two years of the pandemic than in normal times, a figure that shows many countries are suffering less. In Egypt, the excess of deaths is about 12 times greater than the official number of Covid; in Pakistan, this figure is eight times as high. Developing countries bear the brunt, with nearly eight million people dying in middle-income countries by the end of 2021.
“Covid-19 is more than a health crisis: it causes severe social upheaval,” said Dr.
“Covid-19 is exposing and deepening political fault lines between countries,” he said. “It has destroyed trust among people, governments and institutions driven by myths and misinformation. It shows the inequality in the world, with the poorest and most vulnerable communities affected and the last to receive access to vaccines and other tools.
The WHO leader who told the media about the end of the emergency described the moment as emotional. “It doesn’t have to be that way,” said Dr. Van Kerkhove. “We cannot forget the images of hospital ICUs filled to capacity, the images of medical gloves filled with warm water holding the hands of loved ones who have died, with health workers ensuring that they do not die alone. We cannot forget the fires or the mass graves that dug up.
Covid, he noted, continues to spread: the WHO recorded 2.8 million new cases worldwide, and more than 17,000 deaths, from 3 to 30 April, the latest number available. As many countries have reduced testing for Covid, these numbers may represent a low number.
The WHO emergency declaration was an important guide when it was made on January 30, 2020, when only 213 people died from the virus. It signals to the world that the new virus poses a threat outside of China, where it originated, and gives countries a critical shot at imposing unpopular or disruptive public health measures.
The virus that jumped to humanity at the end of 2019 proved to be an unpredictable enemy, mutating rapidly and significantly in a way that allowed it to rise again and destroy the country as thought the worst was past.
A brutal wave of Delta variants ravaged India just weeks after Prime Minister Narendra Modi boasted about how the country was handling the Covid response. The Omicron variant, although less virulent, spreads with deceptive ease making it the fourth leading cause of death in the United States in 2022, and the leading killer in many other countries.
The first large-scale vaccination began on December 8, 2020, less than a year after the first case of the disease was reported to the WHO, a remarkable victory for science. But the collaborative process of vaccine development was followed by a period of hoarding and grim nationalism; a year ago, while people in industrialized countries received the second and third doses of the vaccine, only five percent of people in sub-Saharan Africa had been vaccinated.
Dr Githinji Gitahi, executive director of Amref Health Africa, said it was time to lift the emergency. “The danger of keeping it forever is that it dilutes the tool — you have to keep it strong,” he says.
The declaration helped expand resources for Africa, he said, but did nothing to combat the grim experience of what he called “vaccine injustice.” Amref continues to work to support vaccination in 35 African countries; continentwide, coverage now stands at 52 percent.
The pandemic also has a positive legacy, said Dr. Gitahi, as it led to the highest level of cooperation possible among African countries, including the creation of an African Union task force to coordinate the procurement of vaccines. The Covid response has resulted in increased capacity and investment in many African countries in areas such as genomic sequencing and disease surveillance.
The WHO decision was not welcomed by all health experts. Dr. Margareth Dalcolmo, respiratory doctor and member of the National Academy of Medicine of Brazil who is one of the most famous experts in the country to guide the public through Covid, said that it is not too soon to lift the emergency, because there are still important tasks such as research on Covid variants and the development of vaccines multivalent. The designation of a global public health emergency also creates an impact for low-income countries to access care and support, he said.
On May 3, the WHO published an updated Covid management plan, which it said will guide countries on how to manage Covid over the next two years as they transition from emergency response to long-term Covid prevention and control.
Opening the Geneva meeting where WHO experts decided to end the emergency, Dr. Tedros told the committee that in each of the past 10 weeks, the number of Covid deaths reported each week has been the lowest since March 2020. As a result, life has returned. normal in most countries and the health system is being rebuilt, he said.
“At the same time, some critical uncertainties about the evolution of the virus remain, which makes it difficult to predict transmission or seasonal dynamics in the future,” he said. “Surveillance and genetic sequencing has declined dramatically worldwide, making it more difficult to track known variants and detect new ones.”
And access to life-saving Covid treatment continues to be unequal globally, he said.
Dr Dalcolmo said the lifting of the global emergency should be seen not as a milestone, but as a warning. “Get this sign, it’s time to start preparing for the next pandemic,” he said, “because we know respiratory viruses will increase.”
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