“Covid International Health Emergency Ends After 3 Years: WHO’s Response and what’s Next”

2023-05-05 13:56:56

Caracas.- Covid is no longer an international health emergency. 1,191 days (three years and three months) have passed since the World Health Organization (WHO) decreed the alarm until this Friday, when it has ended. The decision, which was announced early this followingnoon, closes an alert that has left 765 million diagnoses and 6.9 million deaths, according to the official count, which falls far short, according to all estimates ( the WHO itself estimates that 20 million lives have been claimed).

“Covid has changed the world and it has changed us,” said WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. “It has been much more than a health crisis. It has caused severe economic disruption, wiping out trillions of gross domestic product, disrupting travel and commerce, closing businesses and plunging millions into poverty. It has caused serious social upheaval, with closed borders, restricted movement, closed schools and millions of people experiencing loneliness, isolation, anxiety and depression”, he added.

The emergency decree that is ending now is the tool that the WHO uses to expedite decisions when a disease has a serious impact on public health and is unusual and unexpected, with a risk of international expansion, and has the capacity to generate restrictions on the movement of goods or people. Although for practical purposes it does not imply any obligation for the countries (which the organization cannot force to make decisions), it is a means to mobilize resources more quickly, authorize medicines (or vaccines) with less paperwork or issue resolutions that have echo in the Member States.

The characterization as a pandemic came later, on March 11, 2020. But this is not included in the international health regulations nor does it have any repercussions for practical purposes. It is simply a way of describing the atypical rise in the incidence of a disease on various continents. And it was also a way to draw the world’s attention to the seriousness of the coronavirus, although delimiting when it begins and ends is something somewhere between the technical and the semantic. And the WHO officials themselves have recalled that the pandemic continues.

But these “have begun to show the first important signs of recovery,” says a report that the WHO has presented this week. According to a survey carried out between the end of last year and the beginning of this year among 139 countries, they are “beginning to restore essential health services for millions of people who lost them during the pandemic.”

A WHO document proposing a transition from the Covid emergency to a long-term response has also seen the light this week. It is a plan to continue reducing the incidence of the coronavirus and its variants, prevent, diagnose and treat Covid to reduce morbidity and mortality and its sequelae and support States for a sustainable response. “Countries have an opportunity to strengthen their health systems for future pandemics,” reads the report.

The WHO emphasizes in this document that the end of the health emergency does not mean that the Covid problem has ended. It is still a new disease from which there are still things to learn (virus mutations are always a threat and more research is needed on persistent Covid), which continues to claim lives and send patients to intensive care.

With information from El País.

1683305189
#decrees #international #emergency #Covid19