On May 5, 2023, WHO officially announced the termination of the Public Health Emergency of International Concern for COVID-19. It means that the COVID-19 epidemic has ravaged the world for more than 3 years and caused 7 million deaths has been effectively controlled. It is also a major milestone in the end of the era of the COVID-19 pandemic.
(Screenshot via WHO)
Taipei, Taiwan (Merxwire) – On May 5, 2023, the World Health Organization officially announced the termination of the Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) for COVID-19. This means that the new crown pneumonia epidemic that has swept the world for more than three years and caused nearly seven million deaths has been effectively controlled to a certain extent, and it is also a major milestone at the end of the era of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The WHO Emergency Committee held its 15th meeting on May 4, at which members and experts discussed the current situation of COVID-19. Due to the increase in the vaccination rate and confirmed infections in the past year, the public’s resistance to the virus and herd immunity has been improved. At the same time, the number of confirmed cases, the number of severe cases, and the number of deaths all showed a downward trend. Moreover, the number of deaths in the past 10 weeks is the lowest since March 2020. The meeting statement announced the end of COVID-19 PHEIC for more than 3 years.
On December 8, 2019, a large-scale infection of COVID-19 broke out in China. It was notified to WHO on December 31, and the risk of human-to-human transmission was confirmed in January 2020. Therefore, the World Health Organization announced on January 30, 2020, that it was listed as a public health emergency of international concern at the highest level of alert, and defined COVID-19 as a global pandemic in March of the same year. With the frequency of calling an expert meeting every three months, it continues to announce its alert level.
PHEIC is an international agreement with legal effect. Countries around the world have declared their domestic public health emergencies by the PHEIC recommendations issued by the WHO. This agreement breaks through national borders and general management regulations and mutually allocates resources needed in emergencies to deal with crises. WHO believes that entering a state of emergency will help international solidarity to fight the epidemic.
According to WHO data, January 2021 will be the peak period of COVID-19, with more than 100,000 deaths per week. The death toll has gradually declined for more than a year, and by late April this year, it had dropped to about 3,500 per week. However, the official global death toll has reached 7 million, and the WHO estimates that the actual death toll may exceed 20 million, seriously affecting the safety of people’s lives.
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Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, there have been more than 765 million confirmed cases worldwide, a total of 13.3 billion doses of vaccines have been administered, and 5 billion people have received at least one dose of vaccine. The global virus infection and the lockdown of the city and country have affected people’s lives and the global economy. As the epidemic cools down and the emergency is lifted, most countries can return to normal life.
Therefore, countries around the world can choose their measures to deal with Covid-19 according to their domestic conditions. In addition to the European countries that have already gradually unblocked, Japan has advanced to April 29 and downgraded its epidemic prevention. Foreigners do not need a vaccine certificate to enter the country for sightseeing and business. Taiwan downgraded COVID-19 from the fifth category of notifiable infectious disease to the fourth level on May 1 and disorganized the epidemic command center. The U.S. will end its state of emergency on May 11.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Secretary-General, specifically reminded everyone that the termination of the emergency does not mean that countries can immediately abolish the defense systems that have been established, or preach to the public that COVID-19 is nothing to worry about. Because the COVID-19 virus still claimed a life every three minutes in the official WHO records last week, and the number of cases in Southeast Asia and the Middle East has recently surged, and the death toll is still in the thousands every week. At the same time, billions of people around the world are not protected because they have not been vaccinated.
The termination of a stage does not mean that everyone can take it lightly because the virus still has the uncertainty and risk of evolution and mutation. After the epidemic has slowed down, surveillance and gene sequencing work in countries around the world has also decreased a lot, so there are many unpredictable changes. Vaccination and variant monitoring must continue to maintain defenses against the virus.
The WHA meeting to be held at the end of May will focus on COVID-19 to discuss epidemic prevention cooperation in the post-epidemic era, as well as the development and distribution of drugs and vaccines when global epidemics occur in the future. It is hoped that a global consensus can be built to formulate a pandemic convention that meets the needs of the world.