COVID-19 no longer qualifies as a global emergency, the World Health Organization decided on Friday.
The organization said that though the emergency phase is over, the pandemic itself has not ended.
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“It’s with great hope that I declare COVID-19 over as a global health emergency,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said.
Tedros said the pandemic has been on a downward trend for over a year, with most countries returning to life as it was before the virus swept the world in 2020.
“That does not mean COVID-19 is over as a global health threat,” he said, adding he wouldn’t hesitate to reconvene experts to reassess the situation if COVID-19 would “put our world in peril."
Under the WHO umbrella, COVID-19 will continue to have similar pandemic status as HIV. However, Tedros warned that new variants remain.
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Despite this decision, many countries have already ended their states of emergency, such as Germany, France, and Britain. In the United States, President Joe Biden signed a bill on April 10 ending the COVID-19 national emergency. The public health emergency will expire on May 11 after Biden decided not to renew it.
Since coronavirus was declared an international crisis on Jan. 20, 2020, the virus has caused an estimated 764 million cases globally, and about 5 billion people have received at least one dose of vaccine.