The devastating coronavirus pandemic that prompted previously unimaginable lockdowns, upended economies around the world, and killed at least 7 million people worldwide has officially come to an end, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
More than three years ago, COVID-19 was first deemed an emergency by WHO. Officials from the UN health agency noted recent spikes in cases in Southeast Asia and the Middle East as evidence that the pandemic hasn’t ended despite the emergency phase being over.
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According to WHO, the virus continues to claim thousands of lives every week. “It is with great hope that I declare COVID-19 over as a global health emergency,” said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
If COVID-19 were to “put our world in peril,” he added, “that does not mean COVID-19 is over as a global health threat.” He also said he wouldn’t hesitate to call another meeting of experts to reevaluate the situation.
Tedros acknowledged that the majority of countries had already recovered from COVID-19 and noted that the pandemic had been on a downward trend for more than a year.
The COVID-19 coronavirus wasn’t yet identified, and there weren’t any significant outbreaks outside of China when the UN health agency first declared the coronavirus an international crisis on January 30, 2020.
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After more than three years, the virus is thought to have resulted in 764 million cases worldwide, and 5 billion people have received at least one dose of the vaccine.
In 2020, Tedros declared COVID-19 to be an emergency, and he stated that his main concern was that the virus could spread to nations with “ill-prepared” health systems.
In fact, the US and Britain were among the nations previously deemed to be the best-prepared for a pandemic, and they also had some of the highest COVID-19 death tolls. Data from the WHO show that only 3% of all reported deaths worldwide occur in Africa.
Most recently, WHO has struggled to look into the coronavirus’s origins, a difficult scientific endeavor that has also grown politically contentious.
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After spending several weeks in China, WHO issued a report in 2021 that said it was “extremely unlikely” that COVID-19 started in a lab and that it most likely spread from animals to humans.
The UN agency later apologized, claiming that “key pieces of data” were still missing and that it was premature to rule out the possibility that COVID-19 had connections to a lab.
China and other nations were criticized by a panel appointed by WHO to review its performance for not acting faster to stop the virus, and the organization was said to be constrained by both its limited financial resources and inability to compel countries to act.
