The international public health alert for covid that the World Health Organization (WHO) decreed on January 30, 2020 has ended. The decision, announced yesterday in a press conference by Tedros Adhanom, director general of the WHO, comes at a time when practically the entire world population has acquired immunity to the coronavirus, the mortality from the covid is at the lowest level since of winter 2020 and health systems recover from the disruption of the pandemic.
The end of the Public Health Emergency of International Interest (PHEIC, by its initials in English, which is the highest level of alert decreed by the WHO) symbolizes the conclusion of the acute phase of the pandemic on a global scale . But it does not imply that the coronavirus has stopped causing problems, nor does it rule out that new, more contagious or virulent variants may emerge in the future.
“This virus is here to stay,” declared Tedros Adhanom. “The worst thing that any country could do now is to use this news to lower its guard, dismantle the [health] systems it has built or convey to citizens the message that there is no need to worry about covid”.
For the WHO, the decision to end the public health emergency is not an end point but a point and follow. According to the health organization, the time has come for covid to stop being managed as an emergency and learn to manage it as an infectious disease among others. “The crisis phase is over, but the covid is not,” declared Maria Van Kerkhove, technical director of the response to the pandemic at the WHO.
At the same time, the WHO demands that the lessons of covid are not forgotten and that the world prepares for future pandemics. “One of the biggest tragedies of covid is that it didn’t have to be this way. (…) Lives have been lost that should not have been lost”, declared Tedros Adhanom. “We have the tools and technologies to better prepare for pandemics, detect them earlier, respond faster and mitigate their impact. But a lack of coordination, a lack of equity and a lack of solidarity have meant that they were not used as effectively as we could have been.”
The number of covid deaths reported to the WHO since the beginning of the pandemic amounts to 6.9 million. “But we know that the number is several times higher, at least twenty million”, said Tedros Adhanom.
To prevent the same mistakes from being repeated in the future, the WHO is promoting an international convention to prepare for pandemics. The work plan foresees that it will be ready in May 2024 and that it will be incorporated into the International Health Regulations, a legally binding text signed by 196 countries.
The Director General of the WHO has taken the decision to end the PHEIC following the recommendations of the Emergency Committee of the covid, a group of independent experts that the health organization formed in January 2020 and that since ‘then it has met approximately every three months. At its last meeting, held in January, when China was suffering its worst wave of the pandemic and it was not yet known what impact it would have on other countries, the Emergency Committee considered it premature to end the PHEIC.
Now that the circumstances have changed, “we need to move to the next phase; we need to fix the weaknesses in our health systems,” said Michael Ryan, executive director of the WHO’s Health Emergencies Programme. Ryan clarified that “there will not be a point at which the WHO will say that the pandemic is over; this virus will continue to circulate for a long time. But the covid has ended as an emergency from a global perspective”.
According to data from the WHO’s latest Weekly Epidemiological Report on covid, published on Thursday, the number of deaths reported in the last 28 days worldwide has decreased by 30% compared to the previous 28 days. In the last ten weeks, the death toll has been at the lowest levels since March 2020. Even so, the last month has seen an average of 8,500 deaths per day from covid.
