Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO), speaks during a news conference in Geneva, Switzerland, December 20, 2021.
Denis Balibouse | Reuters
The spread of Covid-19 is no longer a global public health emergency, the World Health Organization declared on Friday.
“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 at a press conference in Geneva.
“This trend has allowed most countries to return to life as we knew it before Covid-19,” Tedros said.
“It’s therefore with great hope that I declared Covid-19 over as a global health emergency,” he said.
Nearly 7 million people have died from the virus worldwide since the WHO first declared the emergency on January 30, 2020, according to the U.N. organization’s official data. Tedros said the the true death toll is at least 20 million.
The WHO’s decision comes as the U.S. is set to end its national public health emergency on May 11.
Tedros said there is still a risk that new variant could emerge and cause another surge in cases. He warned national governments against dismantling the systems they have built to fight the virus.
“This virus is here to stay. It’s still killing and it’s still changing,” he said.
But the WHO head said the time has come for countries to transition from an emergency response to managing Covid like other infectious diseases.
Covid first emerged in Wuhan, China in December 2019 when several patients began to experience pneumonia symptoms with unknown cause.
More than three years later, the origins of the virus are still a hotly contested mystery. Scientists, government officials and the general public continue to debate whether Covid spilled over to humans from an infected animal, or leaked from a lab in China.
The U.S. intelligence community is divided in its assessment of Covid’s origins.
The U.S. government, allied nations and the WHO have criticized the Chinese government for not providing transparent access to data that could help determine how the pandemic started.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
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