WHO lifts high alert on Covid-19 pandemic
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus raised the maximum alert level on Thursday. It was commissioned on January 30, 2020.
“It is with great confidence that I announce that Covid-19 is no longer a health emergency of international concern,” said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
AFP
Covid-19 is now sufficiently under control to raise the maximum alert, the WHO decided on Thursday, three years after a pandemic that killed “at least 20 million” and undermined the global economy and widened the inequality gap.
“I announce with great confidence that Covid-19 is no longer a health emergency of international concern,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said, adding that the disease had caused “at least 20 million” deaths, almost three times as many. than his organization’s previous official figure.
As of May 3, the WHO dashboard showed officially recorded deaths at less than seven million.
The experts, consulted by the director-general, ruled that despite the uncertainties in the evolution of the virus, “it is time to move on to the long-term management of the Covid-19 pandemic.”
The agency’s highest level of alert was announced on January 30, 2020, weeks after the first cases of this new viral respiratory disease were detected in China, and there is no specific treatment against it.
But it wasn’t until the head of the WHO spoke of an epidemic in March 2020 that states and people became aware of the gravity of the situation and more restrictive health measures – sometimes months of confinement – were put in place.
SARS-CoV-2 was already well on its deadly journey, and it would spread across the world very quickly.
The fight against the epidemic has been discovered gradually, often irregularly, illustrated by the chaotic administration of Donald Trump’s presidency, often deaf to scientific recommendations.
Epidemic today
According to WHO figures, if the number of newly registered deaths due to Covid fell by 95% since January, 16,000 more people would die from the disease between the end of March and the end of April. In many other countries the epidemic has faded into the background. Tests and health monitoring are reduced to a minimum. Disarmament envisaged by WHO.
The crisis phase has “passed, but not Covid”, Maria van Kerkov, who managed the fight against Covid-19 within the organization, warned on Friday, calling for “not to lower our security”.
Vaccines – which appeared in record time at the end of 2020 – are nevertheless effective against the most severe forms of the disease despite countless mutations of the original virus.
An undisputed scientific success, vaccines, especially the first activated messenger RNA, were initially monopolized by countries that could pay the highest prices, keeping other countries out for a very long time.
As of April 30, more than 13.3 billion vaccines have been administered.
Antivax mobilized and cast doubt on vaccination in general, supported by massive disinformation campaigns on social networks.
Economic disparities and access to care have been brutally exposed. A long line of Brazilians with huge oxygen cylinders saving loved ones from suffocation is marked by images of countless Bhairavs in India for cremation.
In many countries, the pandemic now seems like background noise, with new variants constantly appearing and threatening to restart the infernal machine.
“The virus continues to mutate and is still capable of causing new waves of contamination and death”, recently underlined the boss of the WHO.
He also drew attention to long Covid exposures, which more or less disable widespread symptoms.
According to him, one infection in 10 translates into prolonged Covid, suggesting that hundreds of millions of people may need long-term care, and the scale and economic and psychological costs are still poorly taken into account.
Finally the last
The world is now looking for the best way to avoid the next health disaster.
But the international community is still unable to determine with certainty how the virus became transmissible between humans.
At first, when the first cases were detected in Wuhan, China, at the end of 2019, two theories clashed: a leak from a laboratory in the city where the virus was studied, or an intermediate animal that infected people who frequented the local market.
This last theory seems to be favored by most of the scientific community, but a ban by the Chinese authorities has hindered progress in the investigation of origins.
At the WHO, member states have also begun discussing a future binding agreement that would nip the next pandemic in the bud and avoid repeating the same mistakes.
It’s not a question of when it will happen.
AFP
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