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The resolution has little practical effect, but it is a moment in the fight against a virus that has killed millions of people and changed lives around the world.
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By Stéphanie Nolen
The World Health Organization announced Friday that it is ending the emergency it declared for Covid-19 more than three years ago, a milestone in the turbulent emergence of a pandemic that has killed millions of people around the world and disrupted daily life in the world. Past conditions. Roads.
“With hope, I claim that COVID-19 has ended as a global fitness emergency,” said WHO Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
Specifically, the resolution adjusts little: many countries have already ended their states of emergency due to Covid, and moved away from almost all the public adequacy restrictions put in the face of the virus. The United States will lift its Covid emergency on May 11. it will continue to have pandemic prestige according to the WHO, as will the H. I. V. fact.
But the lifting of the W. H. O. la designation, officially called a “Public Health Emergency of International Concern,” is a moment in the evolution of human dating with the novel coronavirus.
Dr K. Srinath Reddy, who led the Public Health Foundation of India for the pandemic, said the decision to lift the emergency was appropriate, due to high levels of global immunity to Covid, induced by vaccination or infection, or both.
“It no longer possesses the same danger point,” he said, adding that covid “has reached a point of equilibrium, a safe coexistence with the human host. “
Dr Reddy said the end of the state of emergency is also seen as a moment of human achievement and a “celebration of science”.
“It is vital to recognize that what has caused the virus to replace its character is not only evolutionary biology,” he said, “but also the fact that we have induced it to become less virulent, through vaccination, through masks, through a series of public adequacy measures. “
Globally, there have been 765,222,932 covid cases, 6,921,614 deaths, reported to WHO as of May 3. But those numbers are a gross underestimate of the actual pandemic number. Independent researchers have estimated that the actual number of deaths from the virus is several times higher.
A year ago, the W. H. O. said 15 million more people had died in the first two years of the pandemic than in general times, a figure that showed how much countries had underestimated the victims. official Covid toll; in Pakistan, the figure is 8 times higher. Developing countries have borne the brunt of the devastation, with nearly 8 million more people dying than expected in lower-middle-income countries through the end of 2021.
And covid continues to spread: WHO recorded 2. 8 million new cases worldwide and more than 17,000 deaths, from 3 to 30 April, the most recent figures available. As many countries have reduced their covid testing, those numbers are also likely to constitute a significant figure. underestimate
The WHO’s emergency declaration was a very important guide when it was made on 30 January 2020, when only another 213 people were known to have died from the virus. He signaled to the world that this new virus posed an outdoor risk. China, where it first appeared, and gave countries the importance of imposing potentially unpopular or harmful public fitness measures.
The virus that jumped on humans in late 2019 proved to be an unpredictable adversary, mutating temporarily and in particular in a way that allowed it to resurface and devastate countries just when they thought the worst was over. A brutal wave of the Delta variant devastated India just weeks after Prime Minister Narendra Modi boasted of the country’s good fortune in its reaction to covid. The Omicron variant, though less virulent, spread with deceptive ease that made it the fourth leading cause of death in the United States in 2022, and a leading killer in many other countries.
The first large-scale vaccines began on 8 December 2020, less than a year after the first case of the disease was reported to the WHO, a common triumph of science. But the collaborative vaccine progression procedure was followed during a dark era of accumulation. and nationalism; a year later, when other people in industrialized countries were receiving the last and third doses of the vaccine, only 5% of people in sub-Saharan Africa had been vaccinated.
Dr. Githinji Gitahi, chief executive of Amref Health Africa, said it was time to lift the emergency. “The danger of keeping it is diluting the tool — you want it to maintain its strength,” he said. The declaration helped mobilize resources for Africa, he said, but did nothing to counter the grim feast of what he called “vaccine injustice. “Amref continues to work to help immunization in 35 African countries; Across the continent, the policy now sits at 52 percent consistent.
The pandemic also has a positive legacy, Dr. Gitahi said, as it has boosted the point of cooperation never seen among African countries, adding the creation of an African Union task force to coordinate vaccine procurement.
The WHO’s decision was not well received by all fitness experts. Margareth Dalcolmo, a respiratory physician and member of Brazil’s National Academy of Medicine, who was one of the country’s leading experts in guiding the public through Covid, said it was too early to lift the emergency, given that there are still pressing responsibilities such as research into Covid variants and upcoming better vaccines. The designation of a global public fitness emergency also creates an advantage for low-income countries to access remedies and support, he said.
On 3 May, the W. H. O. published an updated Covid Management Plan, which it said was meant to advise countries on how to manage Covid over the next two years as they move from an emergency reaction to long-term Covid prevention and control.
Opening of an assembly of the O. M. S. mavens in Geneva on Thursday, Dr Ghebreysus told the committee that over the past 10 weeks, the number of weekly deaths reported through Covid had been the lowest since March 2020. As a result, life has returned to normal in most countries and fitness systems. They are being rebuilt, he said.
“At the same time, some critical uncertainties remain about the evolution of the virus, making it difficult to expect long-term transmission dynamics or seasonality,” he said. known variants and stumbling upon new ones. “
And Covid remedies to save lives remain very asymmetrical globally, he said.
Dr. Dalcolmo said the lifting of the global emergency should not be seen as a vital step, but as a warning. “Take this as an alert, a time to start preparing for the next pandemic,” he said, “because we know how to breathe. “Viruses are going to increase. “
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