“It’s … with great hope that I declare Covid-19 over as a global health emergency,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said during a news conference in Geneva. “However, that does not mean Covid-19 is over as a global health threat.”
The Covid-19 [Public Health Emergency of International Concern] has been in effect since Jan. 30, 2020. Since the start of the pandemic, the WHO estimates that at least 20 million people around the world have died from the new disease, though the official death toll is about 7 million.
“Covid has changed our world and it has changed us,” Tedros said. “If we all go back to how things were before Covid-19, we will have failed to learn our lessons and we will have failed future generations.”
Tedros and other WHO officials emphasized that while they were ending the PHEIC, the pandemic is not over. The WHO does not declare the start of a pandemic and it will not declare an end to it either. Still, a Covid-weary world will likely interpret this announcement that way.
“The emergency phase of this global crisis that we’ve all been facing for three-and-a-half years is over, but Covid is here to stay,” said Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO’s Covid technical lead.
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Tedros and members of his senior staff urged governments not to let down their guards but to work to improve the problems in health systems and response operations that the pandemic exposed.
“The battle is not over,” warned Mike Ryan, who heads WHO’s health emergencies program. “We still have weaknesses. And those weaknesses we still have in our system will be exposed by this virus or another virus. And they need to be fixed.”
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