But the lifting of the WHO designation — officially called a “public health emergency of international concern” — is a significant moment in the evolving human relationship with the novel coronavirus.
Dr. K. Srinath Reddy, who led India’s Public Health Foundation through the pandemic, said the decision to lift the emergency was appropriate, because of the high levels globally of immunity to COVID induced by vaccination or infection, or both.
“It no longer possesses the same level of danger,” he said, adding that COVID “has achieved a level of equilibrium, a certain type of coexistence with the human host.”
Reddy said the end of the emergency status should also be appreciated as a moment of human achievement and a “celebration of science”.
“It’s important to recognise that what made the virus change its character is not only evolutionary biology,” he said, “but also the fact that we have induced it to actually become less virulent, by vaccination, by masks, by a number of public health measures.”
Globally, there have been 765,222,932 confirmed cases of COVIDincluding 6,921,614 deaths, reported to the WHO as of May 3. But these figures are a vast undercount of the pandemic’s true toll. Independent researchers have estimated the real death tally of the virus to be many times higher.
A year ago, the WHO said that 15 million more people had died in the first two years of the pandemic than would have in normal times, a figure that laid bare how vastly countries had undercounted victims.
In Egypt, excess deaths were roughly 12 times as great as the official COVID toll; in Pakistan, the figure was eight times as high. Developing nations bore the brunt of the devastation, with nearly 8 million more people than expected dying in lower-middle-income nations by the end of 2021.
And COVID continues to spread: The WHO recorded 2.8 million new cases globally, and more than 17,000 deaths, from April 3-30, the most recent numbers available. As many countries have reduced their testing, these numbers also probably represent a significant undercount.
The WHO’s emergency declaration was a crucial piece of guidance when it was made January 30, 2020, when just 213 people were known to have died of the virus. It signalled to the world that this new virus posed a threat outside of China, where it emerged, and gave countries critical buttressing to impose potentially unpopular or disruptive public health measures.
The virus that jumped into humans in late 2019 proved to be an unpredictable adversary, mutating swiftly and significantly in ways that allowed it to resurge and devastate countries just as they thought the worst was past.
A brutal wave of the delta variant ravaged India just weeks after Prime Minister Narendra Modi bragged about how well the country had done in its pandemic response. The omicron variant, while less virulent, spread with a deceptive ease that made COVID the fourth-leading cause of death in the United States in 2022, and a major killer in many other countries.
The first large-scale vaccinations began December 8, 2020, less than a year after the first case of the disease was reported to the WHO, an extraordinary triumph of science.
But the collaborative process of vaccine development was followed by a grim period of hoarding and nationalism; a full year later, when people in industrialized countries were receiving second and third doses of the vaccine, just 5 per cent of people in sub-Saharan Africa had been vaccinated.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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