WHO ends Global Health Emergency designation for Covid
The World Health Organization announced on Friday that it is ending the state of emergency it declared more than three years ago for Covid-19, a milestone in the erratic rise of a pandemic that has killed millions around the world and disrupted daily life in turned a previously unimaginable state of affairs on its head. ways.
“It is with great hope that I declare Covid-19 over as a global health emergency,” said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
But WHO officials warned that the decision to lift the emergency does not mean an end to the pandemic, warning countries not to take it as a reason to dismantle Covid response systems. Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO’s technical lead on Covid, said the organization wanted to be as clear as possible, knowing that people would question how to think about the future pandemic.
“The emergency phase is over, but Covid is not,” she said.
Indeed, in practice, the decision to end the emergency changes little. Many countries have already ended their own Covid emergency, moving away from almost all of the public health restrictions put in place to control the virus. The United States will lift its Covid emergency on May 11. But the lifting of the WHO designation — officially labeled a “public health emergency of international concern” — is an important moment in the evolving human relationship with the novel coronavirus.
Dr. K. Srinath Reddy, who led India’s Public Health Foundation through the pandemic, said the decision to lift the state of emergency was appropriate, due to high levels of immunity worldwide against Covid, caused by either vaccination or infection, or both.
“It no longer possesses the same level of danger,” he said, adding that Covid “has reached a level of equilibrium, a certain kind 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 recognize that what has changed the character of the virus is not just evolutionary biology,” he said, “but also the fact that we caused it to actually become less virulent, through vaccination, through masks, through a number of public health measures.”
There have been worldwide 765,222,932 confirmed cases of Covid, including 6,921,614 deaths, reported to WHO on May 3. But these numbers vastly underestimate the true toll of the pandemic. “We know the real toll is many times higher, at least 20 million,” said Dr. Tedros.
A year ago, the WHO said 15 million more people had died in the first two years of the pandemic than would have been the case in normal times, a figure that highlighted how vastly many countries had underestimated the number of victims. In Egypt, the excess deaths were about 12 times the official Covid toll; in Pakistan it was eight times higher. Developing countries were hardest hit by the devastation, with nearly eight million more people than expected living in low-middle-income countries by the end of 2021.
“Covid-19 has been so much more than a health crisis: it has caused serious social unrest,” said Dr Tedros, describing crippled economies, closed borders, closed schools and millions of people suffering in isolation.
“Covid-19 has exposed and exacerbated political fault lines within and between nations,” he said. “It has eroded trust between people, governments and institutions, fueled by a deluge of myths and misinformation. It has exposed our world’s searing inequalities, with the poorest and most vulnerable communities being hardest hit and the last to access vaccines and other resources.”
WHO leaders who addressed the media about the end of the emergency described the moment as an emotional one. “It shouldn’t have been like this,” said Dr. Van Kerkhove. “We can’t forget the images of the hospital ICUs completely full, the images of medical gloves filled with warm water holding the hands of our departed loved ones, with health workers making sure they didn’t die alone. We must not forget the pyres or the mass graves that were dug.”
Covid, she noted, continues to spread: WHO registered 2.8 million new cases worldwide, and more than 17,000 deaths, from April 3 to April 30, the most recent figures available. As many countries have reduced their testing for Covid, these numbers likely also represent a significant undercount.
The WHO’s emergency declaration was a crucial piece of guidance when it was made on January 30, 2020, when only 213 people were known to have died from the virus. It sent a signal to the world that this new virus posed a threat outside of China, where it emerged, and gave countries critical backing to impose potentially unpopular or disruptive public health measures.
The virus that entered humans in late 2019 proved to be an unpredictable adversary, mutating quickly and significantly in a way that allowed it to rise again and ravage countries just as they thought the worst was over.
A relentless wave of the Delta variant swept India just weeks after Prime Minister Narendra Modi bragged about how well the country had done in its response to Covid. The Omicron variant, while less virulent, spread with a deceptive ease that made it the fourth leading cause of death in the United States by 2022 and a major killer in many other countries.
The first large-scale vaccinations began on December 8, 2020, less than a year after the first case of the disease was reported to WHO, an extraordinary triumph of science. But the collaborative vaccine development process was followed by a grim period of hoarding and nationalism; a full year later, when 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 in keeping it forever is diluting the tool — you need it to maintain its strength,” he said.
The statement helped mobilize resources for Africa, he said, but did nothing to counter the bleak experience of what he called “vaccine injustice.” Amref continues to support vaccination in 35 African countries; across the continent, coverage is now 52 percent.
The pandemic also has a positive legacy, said Dr. Gitahi, for driving the highest level of cooperation ever between African countries, including the creation of an African Union task force to coordinate procurement of vaccines. The Covid response has led to increased capacity and investment in many African countries in areas such as genomic sequencing and disease surveillance.
The WHO’s decision was not welcomed by all health experts. Dr. Margareth Dalcolmo, a respiratory physician and member of Brazil’s National Academy of Medicine, one of that country’s most prominent experts guiding the public through Covid, said it was too early to lift the emergency as urgent tasks remain. such as research into Covid variants and development of multivalent vaccines. The designation of a global public health emergency also creates leverage for lower-income countries to access treatment and support, she said.
On May 3, the WHO issued an updated Covid management planwhich was said to be intended to guide countries in dealing with Covid over the next two years as they transition from emergency response to long-term Covid prevention and control.
Speaking at the opening of the meeting in Geneva where WHO experts decided to end the emergency, Dr. Tedros told the committee that the number of weekly reported Covid deaths during each of the past 10 weeks was the lowest since March 2020. As a result, life has returned to normal in most countries and health systems are rebuilding, he said.
“At the same time, some critical uncertainties about the evolution of the virus remain, making it difficult to predict future transmission dynamics or seasonality,” he said. “Surveillance and genetic sequencing have declined significantly around the world, making it more difficult to track down known variants and detect new ones.”
And access to life-saving Covid treatments remains highly unequal worldwide, he said.
Dr. Dalcolmo said the lifting of the global emergency should not be seen as a milestone, but as a warning. “Consider this a warning, a time to be prepared for the next pandemic,” she said, “because we know respiratory viruses are going to be on the rise.”