The COVID-19 pandemic, which is entering its fourth year and has already claimed millions of lives, remains serious enough to maintain the maximum alert level launched three years ago to the day.
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The World Health Organization (WHO) confirmed on Monday that the COVID-19 pandemic remains a public health emergency of international concern as it first did on January 30, 2020.
The world then had less than 100 cases and no deaths outside of China.
The WHO listed more than 752 million patients on Friday and nearly 7 million dead, according to official figures, far below the reality of the organization’s own admission.
Its director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, followed the recommendations of the Emergency Committee on COVID-19, experts who met for the 14th time last week.
“As we enter the fourth year of the pandemic, there is no doubt that we are in a much better situation now than a year ago when the Omicron wave was at its peak,” said the boss of WHO at the opening of its Executive Committee meeting Monday in Geneva for a week.
But, he immediately tempered: “Since the beginning of December, the deaths reported each week have increased. Over the past eight weeks, more than 170,000 people have lost their lives to COVID-19.”
“My message is clear: ‘Do not underestimate this virus, it has surprised us and will continue to surprise us and it will continue to kill, unless we do more to provide the means of sanitation to the people who need it and to fight against disinformation on a global scale”, had insisted the director general last week.
For the week of January 16-22, half of the official 40,000 deaths were recorded in China.
Despite some of the toughest health restrictions in the world, variants of the virus have managed to break through and at the end of last year, in the face of popular discontent, Chinese authorities were forced to abandon the zero COVID policy. .
The gigantic wave of infections, which swept the country, now seems to be easing. Officially the number of deaths has dropped by almost 80%.
Scarred by the failures at the start of 2020, many countries had introduced restrictions for travelers from China.
In fact, the alert launched on January 30, 2020, served by an evocative name, had failed to convince the authorities and the general public of the urgency of the situation. It wasn’t until March 11 when Dr. Tedros spoke publicly about a “pandemic” for the first time that the worst health crisis in over a hundred years was taken seriously.
Three years later, the Committee believes that “the COVID-19 pandemic is probably at a transition point”, but the head of the WHO regrets that surveillance and genetic sequencing, which make it possible to follow the evolution of the virus and its movements, have fallen sharply. He also regrets that too few people are properly vaccinated, whether in poor countries due to lack of serums, means and mistrust or in better-off countries where weariness is emerging and where the anti-vax movement has sown doubt, despite numerous studies showing their benefits from vaccines.
“We cannot control the COVID-19 virus, but we can do more to address vulnerabilities in populations and health systems,” Dr. Tedros said on Monday.
But the world remains “dangerously unprepared” for the next pandemic, the Red Cross warned in a report on the lessons of the pandemic published on Monday.
“The next pandemic could be imminent and if the experience of COVID-19 doesn’t accelerate preparations, what will?” asked Jagan Chapagain, secretary general of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC).
“Global preparedness for the COVID-19 pandemic was inadequate and we are still suffering the consequences. There will be no excuses” if we do not prepare, he stressed.