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WHO ends Covid-19 pandemic after three years

by Luqmaan Rawat

World – After three years of declaring Covid-19 a “public health emergency of international concern”, The World Health Organization (WHO) has downgraded its status. WHO Director-General, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, announced the change on Friday at the agency’s headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland.

The change came after the global health agency’s Emergency Committee met on Thursday and recommended an end to the coronavirus crisis. The Covid-19 death rate has slowed from a peak of more than 100,000 people per week in January 2021 to just over 3,500 in the week to April 24, 2023. This is due to widespread vaccinations, better treatments and population immunity from prior infections.

While the pandemic has officially ended, it does not mean Covid-19 does not exist anymore, warned Mohamed Hoosen Suleman, a fifth year medical student who was part of the high level meeting on antimicrobial resistance in Denmark hosted by WHO.

“It’s important to remember that Covid-19 is still present and in some parts of the world, there is still transmission of the virus. The transmission is at a relatively low level… The point of these meetings [held by the the Covid-19 Emergency Committee] is to discuss the state of transmission of Covid-19 in the global setting and to assess the response of different countries. In the committee it was unanimously agreed that the public health emergency of international concern of Covid-19 should be called off.”

 

How the new ruling will change our lives

We have been living under the pandemic for the past three years but this new declaration will have no impact on our lives, explained Suleman. Part of the reason for the pandemic to be declared over is because of how freely we are currently living.

“We have been living life freely as if there’s no viral transmission for the past year. In June of last year, our minister of Health repealed all regulations of Covid-19. This has allowed us to move freely and I think even in many parts of the world people have been moving freely. There have been no restrictions but that is ultimately what led the WHO to make an informed decision. A decision that is guided by science and evidence-based medicine.”

We are currently at the lowest levels of “transmission and morbidity” when it comes to Covid-19. Some countries have even stopped reporting and compiling statistics.

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Awareness surrounding Covid-19 

While the pandemic has ended, Suleman and various WHO members have urged people and nations to not forget the lessons learned during this pandemic. Precaution and safety measures must still be taken.

“All it takes is for a mutation to develop, to actually dominate and once the favourable version of the viral strain, if that takes precedence, then we’ll find that transmission of the virus will increase. As much as we continue to live freely and we move about openly, we need to be equally cognizant of the fact that there is still a microorganism of SARS-CoV-2. That it is still with us and will most likely forever be with us and it’s just that it does not pose a threat as it used to previously.”

 

To hear more from Mohamed Hoosen Suleman about the precaution to take and the lessons learnt from the pandemic, listen to the podcast here:

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