WHO says Covid-19 emergency is over

The Covid-19 emergency is over after at least 20mn deaths, the World Health Organization said on Friday, ending a designation in place for more than three years since the novel coronavirus began sweeping across the world.

The UN body said Covid was no longer a “public health emergency of international concern”, or PHEIC — the highest possible status under international health regulations, which was first applied to the disease in January 2020.

WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said it was “with great hope that I declare Covid over as a global health emergency”.

Tedros added: “It is time for countries to transition from emergency mode . . . It’s a decision that has been considered carefully for some time.”

The largely symbolic move, which follows a decision by the WHO’s emergency committee on Thursday, will serve as a signal to health systems globally to further scale back lab capacity, access to countermeasures such as drugs and vaccines, and Covid emergency care infrastructure.

But Maria van Kerkhove, the WHO’s technical lead for Covid, warned that “the emergency phase is over but Covid is not . . . While we’re not in crisis mode, we can’t let our guard down.”

“We don’t want to see systems shut down, people laid off, labs closed. However, we have to calibrate what was done in the crisis,” she said.

The health body began using the word “pandemic” in March 2020 to alert the world to the perils of the virus, though the term bears no legal meaning.

The global outbreak has killed nearly 7mn and infected 765mn people, according to WHO-compiled figures. Both numbers are believed to be significant underestimates because of limited testing. Tedros said the true figure was higher, probably at least 20mn deaths.

The head of the top US public health agency announced her departure hours after the WHO’s announcement. Rochelle Walensky said she would step down in June as head of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a role she has held since December 2020.

She said the end of the Covid public health emergency was a “tremendous transition” for the US and for public health.

Tedros said that in close to three and a half years since the first cluster of cases of pneumonia of unknown cause was detected in Wuhan, China, Covid had “turned our world upside down” — with borders closed, economies ravaged and movement restricted for hundreds of millions of people.

“Covid has exposed and exacerbated political faultlines, it has eroded trust between people, and it has laid bare the searing inequality of our world,” said Tedros. “Those scars must serve as a permanent reminder of the potential for new viruses to emerge with devastating consequences.”

Member states at the WHO are negotiating a new pandemic treaty, with countries deeply divided over what the end-product should look like, the Financial Times has reported.

Tedros said negotiations for the accord were “about a commitment to future generations . . . that we will not go back to the old cycle of panic and neglect that left our world vulnerable, but move forward with a shared commitment to meet shared threats with a shared response”.

The WHO was a vocal advocate for vaccine equity at the height of the pandemic, when the world was experiencing severe shortages and drugmakers were accused of prioritising richer countries.

“It didn’t have to be this way,” Tedros said. “We have the tools and the technologies to prepare for pandemics better, to detect them earlier, to respond to them faster, and to mitigate their impact.”

Other diseases that have been designated as PHEICs include polio and mpox, formerly known as monkeypox — both of which still carry the status — plus Ebola, which shed the label in 2020.

Additional reporting by Peter Wells