WHO declares coronavirus is still a global health emergency

THE coronavirus remains a global health emergency, the World Health Organisation’s chief said yesterday, after a key advisory panel found the pandemic may be nearing an ‘inflexion point’ where higher levels of immunity can lower virus-related deaths.

At the opening of the organisation’s annual executive board meeting, WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said ‘there is no doubt that we’re in a far better situation now’ than a year ago – when the highly transmissible Omicron variant was at its peak.

But Dr Tedros warned that in the last eight weeks, at least 170,000 people have died around the world in connection with the coronavirus.

He called for at-risk groups to be fully vaccinated, an increase in testing and early use of antivirals, an expansion of lab networks, and a fight against ‘misinformation’ about the pandemic.

‘We remain hopeful that in the coming year, the world will transition to a new phase in which we reduce hospitalisations and deaths to the lowest possible level,’ he said.

Dr Tedros’s comments came moments after the WHO released findings of its emergency committee on the pandemic, which reported that some 13.1billion doses of Covid-19 vaccines have been administered – with nearly 90% of health workers and more than four in five people over 60 years of age having completed the first series of jabs.

‘The committee acknowledged that the Covid-19 pandemic may be approaching an inflexion point,’ the WHO said in a statement.

Higher levels of immunity worldwide through vaccination or infection ‘may limit the impact’ of the virus that causes Covid-19 on ‘morbidity and mortality’, the committee said.

It also cited ‘pandemic fatigue’, as well as the increasing perception that Covid19 isn’t the risk it once was, as being behind people increasingly ignoring health measures such as mask-wearing and social distancing.