The World Health Organization announced on Friday that it was ending the emergency it declared for Covid-19 more than three years ago, a milestone in the fitful emergence from a pandemic that has killed millions of people around the world and upended daily life in previously unimaginable ways, APA reports citing the New York Times.
“With great hope, I declare Covid-19 over as a global health emergency,” said the W.H.O. director general, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
In practical terms, the decision changes little: Many countries have already ended their states of emergency for Covid, and have moved away from almost all public health restrictions implemented to control the virus. The United States will lift its Covid emergency on May 11. The virus will continue to have pandemic status according to the W.H.O., much as H.I.V. does.
But the lifting of the W.H.O. designation — officially called a “public health emergency of international concern” — is a significant moment in the evolving human relationship with the novel coronavirus.
Dr. K. Srinath Reddy, who led India’s Public Health Foundation through the pandemic, said the decision to lift the emergency was appropriate, because of the high levels globally of immunity to Covid, induced by vaccination or infection, or both.
“It no longer possesses the same level of danger,” he said, adding that Covid “has achieved a level of equilibrium, a certain type of coexistence with the human host.”
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