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The World Health Organization said on Friday that COVID-19 does not qualify as a global emergency, marking a symbolic end to the devastating coronavirus pandemic that has caused unprecedented lockdowns, crippled economies around the world and killed at least seven million people worldwide.
The WHO said that although the emergency phase has ended, the pandemic is not over, as cases have surged in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. The UN health agency says thousands of people are still dying from the virus every week.
“It is with great anticipation that I declare COVID-19 a global health emergency,” said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. “This does not mean that COVID-19 is over as a global health threat.”
When the UN health body first declared the coronavirus an international crisis on January 30, 2020, it had not yet been named COVID-19 and there were no major outbreaks outside of China.
More than three years later, the virus has caused an estimated 764 million cases worldwide and about five billion people have received at least one dose of the vaccine.
In the US, the public health emergency declaration made regarding COVID-19 will expire on May 11, when extensive measures to support the pandemic response, including the vaccine mandate, will end. Many other countries, including Germany, France and the UK, relaxed many of their provisions for the pandemic last year.
While Tedros declared COVID-19 an emergency in 2020, he said his biggest fear was the potential for the virus to spread in countries with weak health systems that he described as “unprepared.”
In fact, some of the countries with the worst COVID-19 death tolls were previously considered the least prepared for the pandemic, including the US and the UK. According to WHO data, the number of deaths reported in Africa is only three percent of the global total.
The WHO made the decision to lower the maximum alert level on Friday, after convening a group of experts on Thursday. The UN agency has not “declared” a pandemic, but first used the term to describe the outbreak in March 2020, when the virus spread to every continent except Antarctica, long after many other scientists said the pandemic was already underway.
Criticized for its handling of the pandemic
The WHO is the only agency tasked with coordinating the world’s response to acute health threats, but the organization has repeatedly stalled as the coronavirus unfolds. In January 2020, the WHO publicly congratulated China for its swift and transparent response, although a recording of a private meeting obtained by The Associated Press showed top officials were frustrated by the country’s lack of cooperation.
The WHO has also advised members of the public to wear masks to protect against COVID-19 for months, a mistake many health officials say is costing them lives.
Many scientists have also slammed the WHO’s reluctance to admit that COVID-19 is often airborne and asymptomatic people, criticizing the lack of strong guidance to prevent such exposure.
Tedros is a critic of rich countries stockpiling limited supplies of the COVID-19 vaccine, warning that the world is in “catastrophic moral failure” for failing to share the shot with poor countries.
More recently, the WHO has struggled to investigate the origins of the coronavirus, a challenging scientific endeavor that is also politically charged.
After visiting China for several weeks, the WHO published a report in 2021 that concluded that COVID-19 may have jumped to humans from animals, rejecting the possibility that it originated in a laboratory as “unlikely”.
But the UN body backtracked the following year, saying “crucial pieces of data” were still missing and it was premature to rule out that COVID-19 might have been linked to the lab.
A panel commissioned by the WHO to review its performance criticized China and other countries for not acting quickly enough to end the virus and said the organization was limited by limited finances and unable to force countries to act.
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