GENEVA: The World Health Organization head said Thursday that dwindling Covid-19 deaths may have permitted “normal” life to mainly resume, but worries persist as experts discussed if the global health emergency status should be declared over.
The WHO’s emergency committee’s 15th session on the crisis comes over three years following the United Nations health agency 2020 first announced its highest level of alarm over coronavirus.
The committee meets every 3 months to hold discussions about the epidemic and reports to the WHO, which then decides whether or not corona remains a public health emergency of international concern the highest level of alert.
WHO measures to curb Covid-19
The committee meeting, chaired by Dr. Didier Houssin, started shortly following noon and was due to last all afternoon.
Speaking to the health experts, WHO head Tedros recalled that during the last meeting, they had also noted that the number of deaths due to Covid-19 was declining after a spike in China following it lifted restrictions in the country.
He welcomed this trend as the world’s top body estimates that Covid deaths have declined by 95 percent since the start of the current year.
He also discussed inequalities in access to Covid-19 vaccines, medical treatments, and diagnostics, leaving many people at risk. And he also warned that “epidemic tiredness threatens us all.”
The World Health Organization also published a new plan for fighting coronavirus over the upcoming two years, with the objective to “help nations as they transition from an emergency reply to longer-term sustained coronavirus disease prevention and management.
Since the beginning of the outbreak, over 765 million confirmed cases have been reported to the World Health Organization worldwide, including 7 million deaths.
Similarly, over 13.3 billion vaccine doses have also been administered to prevent the deadly virus.
