WHO says Covid remains global emergency, but pandemic could be coming to an end in 2023

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Director General of the World Health Organization (WHO), dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus at an ACANU briefing on global health issues, including the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine, in Geneva, Switzerland, on December 14, 2022.

Denis Balibouse | Reuters

The World Health Organization said on Monday that Covid-19 remains a global health emergency as the world enters the fourth year of the pandemic.

But WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said he hoped the world would move out of the emergency phase of the pandemic this year.

“We remain hopeful that in the coming year the world will move into a new phase in which we reduce hospitalizations and deaths to the lowest possible levels, and health systems are able to manage Covid-19 in an integrated and sustainable way,” Tedros said in declare.

WHO’s emergency committee met on Friday and told Tedros that the virus, which was originally discovered in Wuhan, China in late 2019, remains a public health threat of international concern, the UN agency’s highest level of alert. The WHO first declared a state of emergency in January 2020.

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The WHO decision followed that of the US earlier this month extended the public health emergency until April.

In his statement on Monday, Tedros said the world is in a much better place than it was a year ago, when the micron variant first swept the world. The World Health Organization has estimated that at least 90% of the world’s population has some level of immunity to Covid due to vaccination or infection.

According to the WHO, the weekly number of deaths from covid has decreased by 70% since the peak of the first mass micro wave in February last year. However, the death toll began to rise again in December as China, the world’s most populous country, faced its biggest wave of infections on record.

Tedros said on Friday that surveillance and genetic sequencing have declined dramatically, making it difficult to track variants of Covid and detect new ones. Not enough seniors are fully vaccinated and many people don’t have access to antiviral drugs, he said.

“Don’t underestimate this virus,” Tedros told reporters at a news conference in Geneva on Friday. “It has continued to surprise us and will continue to kill us if we don’t do more to get health tools to the people who need them and comprehensively tackle misinformation.”

Last month, the head of the WHO said that the end of the emergency phase of the pandemic is closer than ever. In the fall, Tedros said the end of the pandemic was in sight.

“We have never been in a better position to end the pandemic. We are not there yet, but the end is in sight,” Tedros told reporters in Geneva last September.

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