Nearly seven million COVID-19 deaths have been reported to the World Health Organization. More than 1 million of them were in the United States alone. WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus put the real total much higher: “we know the [death] total is several times higher, at least 20 million.”
He gave those figures at a Friday press conference where the WHO lifted its Public Health Emergency of International Concern, or PHEIC, for COVID-19.
“COVID-19 has been so much more than a health crisis, disrupting economies, travel, shattering businesses and plunging millions into poverty,” Tedros said. He added that the pandemic had been on a downward trend for more than a year, and that this “has allowed most countries to return to life as we knew it before COVID-19.”
Then came the declaration itself. “Therefore, with great hope, I declare COVID-19 over as a global health emergency.”
Three years on
Tedros had announced the emergency on Jan. 30, 2020, when there were fewer than 10,000 cases of the virus, most of them in China. The decision to end it comes more than three years later. In between, he said, the disease “turned our world upside down.”
The landscape has changed, though. NPR noted that new variants may still pose a threat, but vaccines and boosters have helped reduce the death rate.
Tedros spoke of “the painful lessons we have learned” and said the investments and capacities built during the pandemic “must not go to waste.” He continued: “We owe it to those we have lost. To leverage those investments, to build on those capacities, to learn those lessons and to transform that suffering into meaningful and lasting change. One of the greatest tragedies of COVID-19 is that it didn’t have to be this way.”
What the label means
A PHEIC is the WHO’s highest alert. The agency has issued the declaration seven times since 2005. It triggers a set of rules that guide the response to threatening outbreaks, including the fast-tracking of tests and medicines.
COVID-19 was the first international health emergency the WHO had announced since an Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2019.
