More than three years after COVID-19 stopped the world in its tracks, the World Health Organization today announced it is ending the international public health emergency.
The announcement follows Thursday’s meeting of the International Health Regulations Emergency Committee on the pandemic. During the meeting, the committee highlighted decreasing death rates, hospitalization and intensive care unit admissions due to COVID-19, as well as high levels of population immunity.
Although acknowledging that uncertainties remain about the evolutions of SARS-C0V-2, the committee said it’s time to transition to long-term management of the pandemic.
“For more than a year, the pandemic has been on a downward trend, with population immunity increasing from vaccination and infection, mortality decreasing and the pressure on health systems easing,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a press briefing, adding that he accepted the recommendations from the committee. “It is therefore with great hope that I declare COVID-19 over as a global health emergency.”
COVID-19, the organization said, is “now an established and ongoing health issue which no longer constitutes a public health emergency of international concern.”
The WHO will convene an IHR review committee to create standing recommendations for long-term management of the pandemic. The organization declared the coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency of global concern in January 2020, six weeks before labeling it a pandemic.
Globally, there have been 765 million confirmed COVID-19 cases and 6.9 million deaths, according to WHO data. As of April 30, 13 billion COVID-19 vaccine doses have been administered.
The WHO Coronavirus Dashboard shows 103 million confirmed COVID-19 cases in the United States, and 1.1 million deaths.
President Biden in January announced the COVID-19 national and public health emergency declarations in the United States would end May 11, although he later signed a bill to end the national emergency a month early. The PHE-related action moved the federal coronavirus response to treating the virus as an endemic threat to be managed through agencies’ normal authorities.
At that time, the WHO said the coronavirus pandemic remained a global health emergency, but acknowledged the crisis likely was at an “inflection point” where higher levels of immunity would soon lead to lower virus-related deaths.
