GENEVA (AP):

The World Health Organisation (WHO) said yesterday that COVID-19 no longer qualifies as a global emergency, marking a symbolic end to the devastating coronavirus pandemic that triggered once-unthinkable lockdowns, upended economies and killed millions of people worldwide.

The announcement, made more than three years after WHO declared the coronavirus an international crisis, offers some relief, if not an ending, to a pandemic that stirred fear and suspicion, hand-wringing and finger-pointing across the globe.

The United Nations (UN) health agency’s officials said that even though the emergency phase was over, the pandemic is not over, noting recent spikes in cases in southeast Asia and the Middle East.

WHO said thousands of people are still dying from the virus every week, and millions of others are suffering from debilitating, long-term effects.

“It’s with great hope that I declare COVID-19 over as a global health emergency,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said.

“That does not mean COVID-19 is over as a global health threat,” he said, warning that new variants could yet emerge. Tedros noted that while the official COVID-19 death toll was seven million, the real figure was estimated to be at least 20 million.

Tedros said the pandemic had been on a downward trend for more than a year, acknowledging that most countries have already returned to life before COVID-19.

He bemoaned the damage that COVID-19 had done to the global community, saying the pandemic had shattered businesses, exacerbated political divisions, led to the spread of misinformation and plunged millions into poverty.

The political fallout in some countries was swift and unforgiving. Some pundits say missteps by President Donald Trump in his administration’s response to the pandemic had a role in his losing re-election bid in 2020. The United States (US) saw the deadliest outbreak anywhere in the world, where more than one million people died across the country.

Dr. Michael Ryan, WHO’s emergencies chief, said it was incumbent on heads of states and other leaders to negotiate a wide-ranging pandemic treaty to decide how future health threats should be faced.

Ryan said that some of the scenes witnessed during COVID-19, when people resorted to “bartering for oxygen canisters”, fought to get into emergency rooms and died in parking lots because they couldn’t get treated, must never be repeated.

When the UN health agency first declared the coronavirus to be an international crisis on January 30, 2020, it hadn’t yet been named COVID-19 and there were no major outbreaks beyond China.

More than three years later, the virus has caused an estimated 764 million cases globally and about five billion people have received at least one dose of vaccine.

In the US, the public health emergency declaration made regarding COVID-19 is set to expire on May 11, when wide-ranging measures to support the pandemic response, including vaccine mandates, will end. Many other countries, including Germany, France and Britain, dropped most of their provisions against the pandemic last year.

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.

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 Britain. According to WHO data, the number of deaths reported in Africa account for just three per cent of the global total.

Mark Woolhouse, an infectious diseases professor at the University of Edinburgh, described COVID-19 as a “once-in-a-lifetime disaster” and said that broad immunity against the virus meant we were now in a new phase of the outbreak.

Woolhouse noted there had also been significant criticism of WHO’s pandemic response, in addition to those of its member countries and others.

He lamented that the global community missed numerous chances to stop the coronavirus earlier, in addition to causing much “self-inflicted harm” by shutting down much of society.

“Given the ever-present threat of another pandemic, lessons need to be learnt,” he said.