The World Health Organization (WHO) determined on Thursday that COVID-19 no longer constitutes a global public health emergency.
Its decision was made public Friday morning, almost one month after President Joe Biden moved to end the United States’ national emergency declaration and more than three years since the novel virus first appeared in China and began to spread worldwide.
A meeting of the International Health Regulations (2005) (IHR) Emergency Committee was held this week, during which committee members acknowledged that “SARS-CoV-2 has been and will continue circulating widely and evolving, it is no longer an unusual or unexpected event,” according to a statement by the WHO.
“The WHO Director-General concurs with the advice offered by the Committee regarding the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. He determines that COVID-19 is now an established and ongoing health issue which no longer constitutes a public health emergency of international concern,” reads the statement.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus offered remarks on what, in many ways, is the end of a turbulent era in world history, commenting on the virus’s evolution into an increasingly weaker pathogen.
“This trend has allowed most countries to return to life as we knew it before Covid-19. It’s therefore with great hope that I declared Covid-19 over as a global health emergency,” Ghebreyesus said.
Still, Mike Ryan, executive director of WHO’s Health Emergencies Programme, cautioned, “There’s still a public health threat out there, and we all see that every day in terms of the evolution of this virus, in terms of its global presence, its continued evolution and continued vulnerabilities in our communities, both societal vulnerabilities, age vulnerabilities, protection vulnerabilities, and many other things.”
“So, we fully expect that this virus will continue to transmit, but this is the history of pandemics. In most cases, pandemics truly end when the next pandemic begins. I know that’s a terrible thought but that is the history of pandemics,” he concluded.
