3 years after WHO’s highest Covid alert, pandemic still an emergency.
The United Nations Health Organization’s Emergency Committee on Covid-19 met last Friday for the 14th time since the crisis began. Following the meeting, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus “concurred with the advice presented by the Committee on the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic and determined that the event was a public health event of international concern.” The state of emergency (PHEIC) will continue to be formed,” the organization said in a statement.
Tedros, he said, “recognizes the Committee’s views that the Covid-19 pandemic is likely at a transition point and advises the Committee to carefully navigate this transition and minimize potential negative consequences.” Appreciates.”
Ahead of the meeting, the WHO chief had suggested that the emergency phase of the pandemic was not over, pointing to the rising death toll and warning that the global response to the crisis was “shaky”.
“As we enter the fourth year of the pandemic, we are certainly in a much better position now than we were a year ago, when the Omicron wave was at its peak, reporting more than 70,000 deaths to the WHO every week. was going.” He told the committee at the start of Friday’s meeting.
Tedros said the weekly death rate fell below 10,000 in October but has been rising again since the start of December, while China’s lifting of Covid restrictions has increased deaths.
He said that in mid-January, around 40,000 weekly Covid deaths were reported – more than half of them in China – while the true number is “definitely much higher”.
Novel Coronavirus
The WHO first declared a so-called PHEIC because what was then called a novel coronavirus began spreading outside of China on January 30, 2020.
Although the declaration of PHEC is an internationally agreed mechanism for mobilizing a global response to such an outbreak, Tedros on March 11, 2020, declared the worsening situation of Covid as a pandemic. Many countries realized this danger only after doing so.
Globally, more than 752 million confirmed cases of Covid-19 have been reported to the WHO, including more than 6.8 million deaths, although the UN health agency always emphasizes that the true number is higher. The number is much higher.
