“I think we’re getting to the point where we can look at Covid-19 the same way we look at seasonal flu, which is a health threat, a virus that will continue to kill, but a virus that doesn’t disrupt our society or our hospital systems,” WHO emergency programs chief Michael Ryan told a news conference.
Alongside him, the Director General of the WHO, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said he was “very satisfied to note that, for the first time, the weekly number of deaths reported over the past four weeks has been lower than the one recorded when we used the word + pandemic + for the first time, three years ago”.
“We are certainly in a much better position today than at any time during the pandemic,” he observed.
He was thus “confident” that the WHO might lower its maximum alert level “this year”.
The WHO had declared this “public health emergency of international concern” on January 30, 2020 – when the world had fewer than 100 cases and no deaths outside of China – but it was not until Dr Tedros called the pandemic situation, in March 2020, that the world had taken full measure of the seriousness of the health threat.
“We had declared a global health emergency to urge countries to take decisive action, but not all did,” he said on Friday.
“Three years later, almost seven million deaths from Covid-19 have been reported, although we know that the number of deaths from Covid-19 is higher,” he said.
