Covid, having killed at least 20 million, no longer global health emergency: WHO

Geneva, Switzerland (AFP):

The Covid-19 pandemic, which for over three years has killed millions of people, wreaked economic havoc and deepened inequalities, no longer constitutes a global health emergency, the WHO said Friday.

It is “with great hope that I declare Covid-19 over as a global health emergency”, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters, estimating that the pandemic had killed “at least 20 million” people — nearly three times the official estimate.

While the UN agency’s lifting of its highest alert level on Friday marks a turning point in the pandemic, the virus is still circulating around the world and could still surprise us, experts warn.

Occasional surges

After the massive waves of infections that hit countries in the pandemic’s early stages, the number of deaths from Covid has dramatically fallen, largely due to increased immunity from vaccination or previous infection.

Covid deaths have dropped by 95 percent since the start of the year, according to the WHO.

Experts now expect a lower normal level of Covid to be punctuated with seasonal resurgences, similar to influenza.

Toll  

More than 765 million Covid infections and nearly seven million deaths have been officially reported to the WHO since the start of the pandemic.

To make up for inconsistently collected or incomplete national tolls, researchers have compared the number of excess deaths worldwide since 2020 to the pre-pandemic figures.

For 2020 and 2021, nearly 15 million excess deaths were due to Covid, either from the disease itself or indirectly through its impact on society, the WHO has said previously.

Last week Patrick Gerland, chief of the UN’s population estimates section, told AFP that they were still waiting on data about 2022 excess deaths from India, which may have been the country with the highest toll.