The World Health Organization (WHO) declared the COVID-19 pandemic officially over on May 5, stating that the virus no longer represents a “global health emergency.”
“For more than a year the pandemic has been on a downward trend,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus announced Friday, according to CNN. “This trend has allowed most countries to return to life as we knew it before COVID-19. Yesterday, the emergency committee met for the 15th time and recommended to me that I declare an end to the public health emergency of international concern. I have accepted that advice,” he concluded.
The announcement comes more than three years after COVID was declared an international public health crisis in Jan. 2020. While life has mostly returned to normalcy compared to the pandemic’s early days, Dr Mike Ryan of the WHO’s health emergencies program warned that the threat of Covid remains, according to the BBC. (RELATED: Lockdown Leaders Scramble To Rewrite History)
Covid-19 global health emergency is over, more than three years after being declared, World Health Organization says https://t.co/58eQvZI3je
— BBC Breaking News (@BBCBreaking) May 5, 2023
“We fully expect that this virus will continue to transmit and this is the history of pandemics. It took decades for the final throes of the pandemic virus of 1918 to disappear. In most cases pandemics truly end when the next pandemic begins,” Ryan explained.
Tedros concurred, warning that declaring an end to the pandemic does not mean the threat is gone. “The worst thing any country can do now is to use this news as a reason to let down its guard, to dismantle the systems it has built, or to send the message to its people that COVID-19 is nothing to worry about,” he stated, according to the BBC.
Tedros added that the “scars” left by COVID should serve as a reminder of the “devastating consequences” new viruses can have on our world, CNN reported. (RELATED: ‘New Evidence Suggests’ Dr. Fauci Was Primary Source Of Covid Disinformation Campaign, House Subcommittee Says)
“One of the greatest tragedies of COVID-19 is that it didn’t have to be this way. We have the tools and technologies to prepare for pandemics better, detect them earlier, respond to them faster, and communicate their impact. But globally, a lack of coordination, a lack of equity, and lack of solidarity meant that those tools were not used as effectively as they could have been,” Tedros said. (RELATED: Danielle Anderson, ‘Expert’ Who Helped ‘Fact Check’ Lab-Leak Theory Was Secretly Part Of Dangerous Coronavirus Research)
“We must promise ourselves and our children and grandchildren that we will never make those mistakes again,” he stated, according to the outlet.