The international public health alert for the covid that the World Health Organization (WHO) decreed on January 30, 2020 has ended. The decision, announced today at a press conference by Tedros Adhanom, director general of the WHO, comes at a time when practically the entire world population has acquired immunity against the coronavirus, mortality from covid is at its lowest level since the winter of 2020 and healthcare systems around the world are reeling from the disruption of the pandemic.
The end of the Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC, for its initials in English, which is the highest alert level decreed by the WHO) symbolically marks 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 and all countries will need to learn how to manage it along with other infectious diseases,†Tedros Adhanom declared yesterday.
The director general of the WHO has made the decision to end the PHEIC following the recommendations of the covid Emergency Committee, a group of experts that the health organization has convened approximately every three months since the start of the pandemic. At its previous meeting, held in January when China was suffering its worst wave of the pandemic and it was not known what impact it would have on other countries, the Emergency Committee considered it premature to end the PHEIC.
According to data from the latest WHO Weekly Epidemiological Report on covid, published yesterday, the number of deaths reported in the last 28 days globally has decreased by 30% compared to the previous 28 days. In the last ten weeks, the mortality figures have been at all times at their lowest levels since March 2020. Even so, an average of 8,500 daily deaths from covid have been registered in the world since the beginning of April.
The end of the public health emergency coincides with the spread of the new XBB.1.16 omicron variant of the coronavirus, informally called Arcturus, which is showing a contagious capacity greater than any previous variant. Identified in India in January this year, it has caused a notable increase in infections in Southeast Asia in March and April. It is also expanding in the United States, where at the end of April it represented 10% of all new confirmed cases of covid. “In Europe, the [XBB.1.16] variant is less prevalent and spreading more slowly,” Nature reported this week.
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