Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director general of the World Health Organization (WHO), speaks during a press conference in Geneva, Switzerland, December 20, 2021.
Denis Balibouse | Reuters
The spread of Covid-19 is not any longer a global public health emergency, the World Health Organization announced on Friday.
“For greater than a yr, the pandemic has been on a downward trend, with population immunity increasing due to vaccination and infection, mortality rates declining and pressure on health systems easing,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a news conference in Geneva.
“This trend has allowed most countries to return to life as we knew it before Covid-19,” Tedros said. “It’s subsequently with great hope that I declare the end of Covid-19 as a global health emergency.”
According to official figures from the UN organization, nearly 7 million people worldwide have died from the virus for the reason that WHO first declared a state of emergency on January 30, 2020. Tedros said the true death toll is at the least 20 million.
The WHO decision comes as the US is due to end its national public health emergency on Thursday.
Tedros said there remains to be a risk that a latest variant could emerge and cause one other spike in cases. He warned national governments against dismantling the systems they’d built to fight the virus.
“This virus will stay here. It’s still killing and it’s still changing,” he said.
However the WHO chief said it was time for countries to move from emergency response to managing Covid like other infectious diseases.
Covid was first observed in Wuhan, China in December 2019, when several patients began experiencing symptoms of pneumonia of unknown cause.
Covid spread rapidly across the globe in early 2020, leading to an unprecedented shutdown of international travel and border closures as countries tried unsuccessfully to prevent the spread of the virus.
Covid has devastated the elderly and other vulnerable populations and devastated hospitals that didn’t have enough beds or supplies to deal with the sudden increase in suffering and death.
Many national governments are shutting down public life in desperate attempts to stop death, leading to a severe economic downturn and social disruption, the long-term consequences of that are unlikely to be fully understood for years to come.
“Covid-19 is far more than a health crisis,” Tedros said. “It has caused major economic shocks, wiping trillions out of GDP, disrupting travel and trade, damaging businesses and plunging thousands and thousands into poverty,” he said.
“This has caused major social upheaval with closed borders, restricted movement, closed schools and thousands and thousands of individuals experiencing loneliness, isolation, anxiety and depression,” Tedros said.
China has come under heavy criticism for not alerting the world sooner, which Beijing denies. Critics have also accused the WHO of relying an excessive amount of on information from Beijing initially of the pandemic.
Greater than three years later, the origin of the virus still stays a mystery. Scientists, government officials and the public proceed to debate whether Covid spread to humans from an infected animal or leaked from a lab in China.
The U.S. intelligence community is split over the origins of Covid.
The US government, allied countries and the WHO have criticized the Chinese government for not having transparent access to data that might help determine how the pandemic began.