That decision came long after many other scientists had said a pandemic was already underway. The UN agency doesn't 'declare' pandemics but first used the term to describe the outbreak in March 2020, when the virus had spread to every continent except Antarctica. WHO decided to lower its highest level of alert on Friday, after convening an expert group on Thursday. An estimated 24million were suffered in the UK. The US also recorded more cases than any other nation, eclipsing the 100million mark. 'We know its far higher than the 7million deaths that have been reported,' the expert said. In the UK, more than 200,000 deaths have been logged.ĭr Kerkhove said the true number of deaths from Covid could be much higher than recorded. In fact, some of the countries that suffered the worst COVID-19 death tolls were previously judged to be the best-prepared for a pandemic, including the US and the UK.Īn estimated 1.1million Americans died from Covid, the most of any nation. When Tedros declared COVID-19 to be an emergency in 2020, he said his greatest fear was the virus' potential to spread in countries with weak health systems he described as 'ill-prepared.' Many other countries, including Germany, France and Britain, dropped many of their provisions against the pandemic last year. On this day, wide-ranging measures to support the pandemic response, including vaccine mandates, will end. President Joe Biden ended the Covid national emergency on April 11. In the US, the public health emergency declaration made regarding COVID-19 is set to expire on May 11. More than three years later, the virus has caused an estimated 764million cases globally and about 5billion people have received at least one dose of vaccine. 'However, we are clearly in a different phase of handling COVID-19, the impact of the virus is clearly much less than it was, and the WHO decision is reasonable.' 'Hopefully, the large wave in China at the beginning of the year – precipitated by that country's abrupt exit from their Zero Covid strategy – will be the last event of such magnitude.'ĭr Michael Head, a senior research fellow at the University of Southampton, said: 'One slightly counter-intuitive aspect is that the WHO has downgraded COVID-19 from a public health emergency, yet the sustained multi-country transmission means it still meets most widely used definitions of a 'pandemic'. 'Rather, it is a recognition that we are no longer seeing major surges in infections, severe illness and death. 'The ending of the emergency is emphatically not the end of Covid as a public health problem,' Prof Mark Woolhouse of the University of Edinburgh, in Scotland, said. However, the WHO leaders now say it is time for countries to treat Covid as they do other infectious diseases. At that point, no major outbreaks had been recorded outside of China. ![]() The health agency first declared Covid an international crisis on January 30, 2020. However, a massive Covid surge in China around the new year that triggered fears of a new strain with traits that had never been seen before made them reconsider. Professor Didier Houssin, a WHO member from France, said the agency first considered lifting the emergency in January. ![]() It's something we came up with over time,' Dr Maria Van Kerkhove, an American infectious disease specialist at the WHO, said in response to a question about why the agency made this decision so late. At the briefing Friday, Dr Tedros said the pandemic is likely responsible for around 20million deaths - due to reporting issues and testing inconsistencies.
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