WHO declares end to Covid-19 global health emergency

The World Health Organization ended its categorization of Covid-19 as a global health emergency on Friday, 5 May, 2023.

The WHO declared Covid-19 to be a public health emergency in January 2020 and a global pandemic in February 2020. Since then, by WHO’s official count, more than 7 million people worldwide have died as a result of contracting the virus, though the organization estimates there have been at least 20 million Covid-related deaths since 2020.

At a press conference, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Covid-19 has reached endemic status but is less of a threat because of the development of vaccines and the large number of people who have already contracted the virus. Covid-19 cases and deaths have reached three-year lows, Ghebreyesus said.

“For more than a year the pandemic has been on a downward trend,” Tedros said. “This trend has allowed most countries to return to life as we knew it before Covid-19.”

The WHO declaration created an agreement whereby individual countries agree to abide by its recommendations for managing the emergency, according to CNN. Each country must then declare its own public health emergency that can be used as legal justification for movement restrictions, resource allocation, and other measures to prevent the spread of disease.

The European Union let its emergency declaration lapse in April 2022, and the United States is set to do the same on 11 May, 2023, which will end government payments for vaccines and Covid testing. Numerous other countries have either rescinded or planned to remove their own emergency declarations.

The pandemic caused unprecedented disruption to the global seafood industry, resulting in wholescale changes to how it did business, many of which are still influencing the sector today.

Tedros said the WHO does still not have enough certainty about the evolution of the virus to confirm it would not ever consider declaring it a public health emergency again in the future.

"I will not hesitate to convene another emergency committee should COVID-19 once again put our world in peril,” Tedros said.

However, while Covid-19 is still circulating and evolving, it presents less of a global concern than it did three years ago, WHO Health Emergencies Program Executive Director Mike Ryan said.

“There’s still a public health threat out there, and we all see that every day in terms of the evolution of this virus, in terms of its global presence, its continued evolution and continued vulnerabilities in our communities, both societal vulnerabilities, age vulnerabilities, protection vulnerabilities, and many other things,” Ryan said. “So, we fully expect that this virus will continue to transmit, but this is the history of pandemics. In most cases, pandemics truly end when the next pandemic begins. I know that’s a terrible thought but that is the history of pandemics.”

The WHO issued an updated Covid management plan on 3 May intended to guide countries in managing Covid as they transition from an emergency footing to a longer-term outlook.

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