It’s Official: COVID-19 Is No Longer A Global Health Emergency
The World Health Organisation (WHO) announced that COVID-19 is no longer considered a global health emergency.
This decision was made following the 15th meeting on COVID-19 of WHO’s International Health Regulations Emergency Committee on Thursday. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus acknowledged the end of the public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC) declaration.
“For more than a year, the pandemic has been on a downward trend,” Tedros stated during a news conference on Friday.
He continued: “This trend has allowed most countries to return to life as we knew it before COVID-19.” The WHO originally declared the coronavirus outbreak a PHEIC in January 2020, about six weeks before classifying it as a pandemic.
The PHEIC declaration creates an agreement between countries to follow the WHO’s recommendations for managing the emergency.
Each country then announces its own public health emergency, giving them legal weight and allowing them to access resources and waive certain regulations to address the crisis. The United States is set to end its COVID-19 public health emergency on May 11th.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, there have been over 765 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 and nearly 7 million deaths, according to WHO data. Europe had the highest number of confirmed cases overall, while the Americas reported the most deaths. The United States accounted for about one in six total deaths.
Cases peaked in December 2022 due to the Omicron variant, particularly affecting the Western Pacific region. However, the global administration of billions of vaccine doses has helped keep death rates far below previous peaks.
More recently, COVID-19 cases and deaths are at their lowest in three years, yet more than 3,500 people still died in the last week of April, and billions remain unvaccinated worldwide.
Will you still be taking precautions?