2023-05-04 20:39:00
The decline in the number of Covid-related deaths allows a “return to a normal situation,” but doubts remain, according to the Director of the World Health Organization.
The organization’s emergency committee meets to decide whether to maintain the state of high alert.
This is the fifteenth meeting of the Expert Committee since the WHO declared on January 30, 2020 a “State of International Public Health Emergency (USPPI)” and is the organization’s highest level of preparedness.
The committee, chaired by French physician Didier Hussein, meets every three months to recommend whether or not this alert level should be maintained, with the final decision to be taken by WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
Days before the previous meeting at the end of January, Tedros announced that he considered it too early to raise the higher alert level.
He expressed his satisfaction with the continued decline in the number of weekly deaths related to the Corona virus, since the peak recorded in China, after the lifting of restrictions in this country.
“This continuing trend has allowed for a return to normal in most countries and strengthened the capacity of health systems to deal with the possibility of a resurgence of the epidemic and to bear the burdens of the post-Covid-19 effects,” the WHO director said in a letter distributed to reporters.
“At the same time, there are major ambiguities about the evolution of this virus, which makes it difficult to predict the dynamics of transmission or its seasonality,” he told the experts.
He pointed out that virus monitoring and genetic sequencing activities have declined dramatically around the world, making it difficult to track known variants and discover new ones.
Pandemic fatigue threatens us all
He said that unequal access to disease treatment tools still exists, especially among the most vulnerable, not to mention that “pandemic fatigue threatens us all. We are all tired of this pandemic and we want to get rid of it.”
While the number of deaths related to Covid-19 decreased by 95% since January, during the period from March 27 to April 23, the epidemic caused the death of at least 16,000 people.
In the new strategy of the World Health Organization to combat Covid-19 for the period from 2023 to 2025, which was revealed on Wednesday, Tedros stressed that the world is currently going through a moment of “hope and uncertainty” in the face of the development of the pandemic.
He stressed that the goal is to “support countries that move from responding to an emergency situation to managing, controlling and preventing the disease in the longer term.”
“This virus is here to stay and all countries have to learn how to deal with it in conjunction with other infectious diseases,” he told the Emergency Committee Thursday.
The epidemic has caused the death of more than 7 million people since the first cases were reported in China at the end of 2019, and more than 765 million infections have been confirmed by the World Health Organization, according to numbers that are certainly much lower than reality, according to the organization.
On January 30, 2020, the World Health Organization sounded the alarm, but countries did not take all measures to confront the spread of the epidemic until Tedros declared Covid-19 a “pandemic”, but the virus had spread quickly and aggressively.
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