The World Health Organization downgraded its assessment of the coronavirus pandemic on Friday, saying it no longer qualifies as a global emergency. The action reverses a declaration that was first made on January 30, 2020, when the disease had not even been named COVID-19 and when there were no major outbreaks beyond China.
A look at what WHO’s decision means:
WHY END THE GLOBAL HEALTH EMERGENCY?
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the pandemic has been “on a downward trend for more than a year, with population immunity increasing from vaccination and infection.” That, he said, has allowed most countries “to return to life as we knew it before COVID-19,” meaning that the worst part of the pandemic is over.
Tedros said that for the past year, WHO and its emergency committee experts have been analyzing COVID-19 data to decide when the time would be right to lower its level of alarm. On Thursday, the experts recommended to Tedros that COVID-19 no longer qualifies as a global emergency and the WHO chief said he accepted that advice.
WHAT ARE THE PRACTICAL EFFECTS?
For the average person, nothing. The classification of a health threat as a global emergency is meant to warn political authorities that there is an “extraordinary” event that could constitute a health threat to other countries and requires a coordinated response to contain it. WHO’s emergency declarations are typically used as an international SOS for countries who need help. They can also spur countries to introduce special measures to combat disease or release extra funds.
Many countries, including Britain, France, Germany and the U.S., have long dropped many of their pandemic-era restrictions. The U.S. is ending its national health emergency next Thursday.
IS COVID-19 STILL A PANDEMIC?
Yes. Although WHO chief Tedros said the coronavirus emergency was over, he warned that the virus is here to stay and that thousands of people continue to die every week. “The risk remains of new variants emerging that cause new surges in cases and deaths,” Tedros said. “What this news means is that it’s time for countries to transition from emergency mode to managing COVID-19 alongside other infectious diseases.”
In April, there were nearly 3 million cases and more than 17,000 deaths reported, including spikes in Southeast Asia and the Middle East, the United Nations agency noted.
SO WHEN WILL THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC END?
It’s unclear. WHO emergencies chief Dr. Michael Ryan said the coronavirus is still a public health threat and that its continued evolution could yet cause future problems. “It took decades…for the pandemic virus of 1918 to disappear,” he said, referring to the Spanish flu that is thought to have killed at least 40 million people.
“Pandemics only truly end when the next pandemic begins,” he said. Ryan said that while COVID-19 will continue to spread among people for a very long time, it is doing so at a much lower level of threat that does not require the extraordinary measures taken to try to curb the virus’ spread.
WHAT ELSE HAS BEEN DECLARED AN EMERGENCY?
WHO has previously declared global emergencies for outbreaks of swine flu, Zika, Ebola, polio and mpox, formerly called monkeypox. Polio was declared nearly nine years ago. Its emergency status has persisted even as officials work to wipe out the disease from a shrinking number of countries.
Last July, WHO chief Tedros declared the explosive spread of mpox to dozens of countries to be a global emergency, overruling the emergency committee he had convened to assess the situation. The disease peaked in Europe and North America shortly after, but technically remains a global emergency.
DO WE STILL NEED TO TAKE COVID-19 PRECAUTIONS?
Yes. Health officials say the virus isn’t going anywhere and advise people to get vaccinated, including getting booster doses if they qualify. Although many of the measures seen at the height of the pandemic — including masks and social distancing — aren’t required except in certain settings, like hospitals or nursing homes, officials say people with other health conditions or compromised immune systems may still want to continue with some of those precautions.
Unlike in the early years of COVID-19, high immunization levels, both from vaccination and previous infection, have helped dramatically reduce disease spread.
Simon Clarke, an associate professor of microbiology at Britain’s University of Reading, warned against people dropping all COVID-19 protections.
“The message to the public should still be to take care and think of others. If you’re ill with a respiratory infection, like a bad cough, don’t put others at risk, especially not those who are vulnerable,” he said. “If you pass on a COVID infection, no one will thank you. If you’re fit and young, COVID can still be nasty and if you’re old and frail, it can kill you.”
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
The World Health Organization said Friday that COVID-19 no longer qualifies as a global emergency, marking a symbolic end to the devastating coronavirus pandemic that triggered once-unthinkable lockdowns, upended economies worldwide and killed at least 7 million people worldwide.
WHO said that even though the emergency phase was over, the pandemic hasn’t come to an end, noting recent spikes in cases in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. The U.N. health agency says that thousands of people are still dying from the virus every week.
“It’s with great hope that I declare COVID-19 over as a global health emergency,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said.
“That does not mean COVID-19 is over as a global health threat,” he said, adding he wouldn’t hesitate to reconvene experts to reassess the situation should COVID-19 “put our world in peril.”
Tedros said the pandemic had been on a downward trend for more than a year, acknowledging that most countries have already returned to life before COVID-19. He bemoaned the damage that COVID-19 had done to the global community, saying the virus had shattered businesses and plunged millions into poverty.
“COVID has changed our world and it has changed us,” he said, warning that the risk of new variants still remained.
When the U.N. health agency first declared the coronavirus to be an international crisis on Jan. 30, 2020, it hadn’t yet been named COVID-19 and there were no major outbreaks beyond China.
More than three years later, the virus has caused an estimated 764 million cases globally and about 5 billion people have received at least one dose of vaccine.
In the U.S., the public health emergency declaration made regarding COVID-19 is set to expire on May 11, when wide-ranging measures to support the pandemic response, including vaccine mandates, will end. Many other countries, including Germany, France and Britain, dropped many of their provisions against the pandemic last year.
When Tedros declared COVID-19 to be an emergency in 2020, he said his greatest fear was the virus’ potential to spread in countries with weak health systems he described as “ill-prepared.”
In fact, some of the countries that suffered the worst COVID-19 death tolls were previously judged to be the best-prepared for a pandemic, including the U.S. and Britain. According to WHO data, the number of deaths reported in Africa account for just 3% of the global total.
WHO made its decision to lower its highest level of alert on Friday, after convening an expert group on Thursday. The U.N. agency doesn’t “declare” pandemics, but first used the term to describe the outbreak in March 2020, when the virus had spread to every continent except Antarctica, long after many other scientists had said a pandemic was already underway.
WHO is the only agency mandated to coordinate the world’s response to acute health threats, but the organization faltered repeatedly as the coronavirus unfolded. In January 2020, WHO publicly applauded China for its supposed speedy and transparent response, even though recordings of private meetings obtained by The Associated Press showed top officials were frustrated at the country’s lack of cooperation.
WHO also recommended against members of the public wearing masks to protect against COVID-19 for months, a mistake many health officials say cost lives.
Numerous scientists also slammed WHO’s reluctance to acknowledge that COVID-19 was frequently spread in the air and by people without symptoms, criticizing the agency’s lack of strong guidance to prevent such exposure.
Tedros was a vociferous critic of rich countries who hoarded the limited supplies of COVID-19 vaccines, warning that the world was on the brink of a “catastrophic moral failure” by failing to share shots with poor countries.
Most recently, WHO has been struggling to investigate the origins of the coronavirus, a challenging scientific endeavour that has also become politically fraught.
After a weeks-long visit to China, WHO released a report in 2021 concluding that COVID-19 most likely jumped into humans from animals, dismissing the possibility that it originated in a lab as “extremely unlikely.”
But the U.N. agency backtracked the following year, saying “key pieces of data” were still missing and that it was premature to rule out that COVID-19 might have ties to a lab.
A panel commissioned by WHO to review its performance criticized China and other countries for not moving quicker to stop the virus and said the organization was constrained both by its limited finances and inability to compel countries to act.
Total Doses Distributed = 982,117,925. Total Doses Administered = 676,006,980. Number of People Receiving 1 or More Doses = 270,129,677. Number of People Fully Vaccinated = 230,582,699.
U.S. deaths fell last year, and COVID-19 dropped to the nation’s No. 4 cause, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Thursday.
COVID-19 deaths trailed those caused by heart disease, cancer and injuries such as drug overdoses, motor vehicle fatalities and shootings. In 2020 and 2021, only heart disease and cancer were ahead of the coronavirus.
U.S. deaths usually rise year-to-year, in part because the nation’s population has been growing. The pandemic accelerated that trend, making 2021 the deadliest in U.S. history, with more than 3.4 million deaths. But 2022 saw the first drop in deaths since 2009.
The 2022 tally was about 3.3 million — a 5% decline from 2021 but still much higher than in the years before the pandemic. The CDC cautioned that last year’s numbers are preliminary and may change a little after further analysis.
Coronavirus-associated death rates fell for nearly all Americans. The virus was deemed the underlying cause of about 187,000 U.S. deaths last year, accounting for about 6% of deaths. The highest COVID-19 death rates were in the South and in an adjacent region that stretches west to Texas, Oklahoma and New Mexico, the CDC said.
The death rates for heart disease and cancer increased during the pandemic, the CDC said. The cancer death rate had been falling for 20 years before COVID-19 hit.
The CDC report indicated a slight decline in the number of injury deaths last year, falling to about 218,000 from about 219,500 the year before. That would be a surprise, given recent trends in rising drug overdose and gun deaths.
CDC officials noted that number could rise. Death certificate data for injury deaths tends to take longer because many involve police investigations.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
The World Health Organization says it has fired the scientist who led a high-profile delegation from the U.N. health agency to China two years ago to jointly look into the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, citing sexual misconduct.
Peter Ben Embarek, who led the WHO side of a joint team with scientists in China, was dismissed last year, the health agency said. WHO says it has stepped up efforts to root out sexual abuse, exploitation and harassment in recent months after a string of cases and incidents were reported in the press.
“Peter Ben Embarek was dismissed following findings of sexual misconduct against him and corresponding disciplinary process,” said spokeswoman Marcia Poole said in an email. “The findings concern allegations relating to 2015 and 2017 that were first received by the WHO investigations team in 2018.”
She said other allegations could not be fully investigated as the “victim(s) did not wish to engage with the investigation process.”
Ben Embarek did not immediately respond to a call or text message to his mobile phone on Thursday. The news was first reported by The Financial Times.
Ben Embarek led an international team picked by WHO that traveled to China in early 2021, visited the Huanan market in Wuhan — the city where the first human cases appeared — and worked closely with Chinese scientists to try to identify how the virus first began sickening people.
The team issued a report in March that year that said the most likely scenario was that COVID-19 jumped from bats to humans via another animal, dismissing a lab leak as “extremely unlikely.” WHO officials, including Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, have since said that the origins remain unclear and the lab-leak theory cannot be ruled out.
Ben Embarek, a Danish expert on disease transmission from animals to humans, told a TV program in Denmark later in 2021 that he had concerns about a Chinese lab near the market later in 2021.
The impact of Ben Embarek’s dismissal on efforts to solve that lingering enigma remains unclear. The joint WHO-China team has since been disbanded, and a separate panel of experts drafted by WHO has taken up the role of trying to find the origins of the coronavirus.
Word of the dismissal comes as WHO is convening an expert group this week to decide if COVID-19 remains an international health emergency, after sharp declines in case counts and deaths from the pandemic in recent months — even if pockets of cases continue.
WHO says it has been working to root out sexual abuse, exploitation and harassment in its ranks after press reports first arose in 2020 about systemic abuse of dozens of women during the agency’s response to an Ebola outbreak in Congo.
More than 80 staffers under the direction of WHO and partners were alleged to have raped women and young girls, demanded sex in return for jobs and forced some victims to have abortions, in the biggest known sex abuse scandal in the U.N. health agency’s history.
Not a single senior manager connected to the Congo abuse has been dismissed, despite documents showing WHO leaders were aware as it was happening. An internal U.N. report submitted to WHO earlier this year found that despite senior managers being informed of the sexual abuse, no misconduct was committed.
Last month, WHO said it fired Fijian doctor Temo Waqanivalu, who faced allegations first reported by the AP, that he had repeatedly engaged in sexual harassment.
Mexican officials celebrated Wednesday the announcement that the country finally developed its own COVID-19 vaccine, more than two years after inoculations from the U.S., Europe and China were rolled out.
It was unclear what use would be made of the vaccine, named “Patria” or “Motherland,” developed in a joint effort between the government and a Mexican company, Avimex, which previously did work on animal vaccines.
Vaccine uptake in Mexico dropped precipitously in late 2022 and 2023, and Mexico still has millions of doses of the Abdala vaccine it bought from Cuba.
María Elena Álvarez-Buylla, the head of Mexico’s government commission for science and technology, said the new vaccine would be approved for use as a booster shot. She did not say whether the government medical approval agency had formally authorized the Patria vaccine.
Dr. Fidel Alejandro Sánchez, who sits on the council of researchers in charge of following virus variants in Mexico, said he had doubts about using a vaccine designed two years ago as a booster to protect against currently circulating strains.
“It is like reading yesterday’s newspaper,” Sánchez said. “It makes no sense to use it as a booster when it wasn’t designed for that.”
Mexico started developing the Patria vaccine in March 2020. But testing was slow, and the country wound up importing 225 million doses, mainly Astra-Zeneca and Pfizer, and some Chinese vaccines.
Mexico bought 9 million doses of the Cuban-made Abdala vaccine in September 2022, even though it was designed for coronavirus variants circulating in 2020 or 2021, not current variants. Few Mexicans have shown up to get the Cuban booster shots.
“This opens the door to recovering vaccine sovereignty,” Álvarez-Buylla said.
Mexico’s official death toll of test-confirmed COVID-19 deaths stands at almost 334,000, but testing was scarce in the early days of the pandemic and the government’s own review of death certificates shows more than 505,000 deaths where COVID-19 was listed as a cause of contributing cause of death.
