Jan 30 (Reuters) – The World Health Organization declared on Monday that COVID-19 remains a public health emergency of international concern, its highest form of alert.
The pandemic is probably at a “transition point” that continues to need careful management to “mitigate potential negative consequences,” the World Health Organization (WHO) added in a statement.
Three years have passed since the WHO first declared COVID a global health emergency. More than 6.8 million people have died during the pandemic, which has affected every country in the world, ravaging communities and economies.
However, the arrival of vaccines and treatments has considerably changed the situation of the pandemic since 2020, and the director general of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has declared that he hopes to see the end of the emergency this year, especially if it can be improve access to countermeasures globally.
Advisers to the WHO expert committee on the state of the pandemic told Reuters in December that now is probably not the time to end the emergency, given uncertainty over the surge in infections in China after it lifted its strict restrictions. at the end of 2022.
(Reporting by Abinaya Vijayaraghavan in Bengaluru and Jennifer Rigby in London; editing by Toby Chopra and Nick Macfie; editing in Spanish by Darío Fernández)
