"We are still in the middle of this pandemic, we all wish it weren't, but we are not at an endemic stage," said WHO Covid chief Maria Van Kerkhove. .
During a question and answer session on social networks, she announced that she had contracted the virus herself, and is in quarantine in the United States.
From Geneva, Michael Ryan, the WHO's emergency manager, added: "I don't think we are close to an endemic situation with this virus".
"It's not yet fully following a temporal cadence, or a seasonal pattern, (...) and so the disease remains quite volatile," he said during the session.
"It is still capable of causing large epidemics as we have seen, and even in populations that have been previously exposed," he said.
Mr Ryan stressed that when a disease becomes endemic it does not mean that the disease is not serious.
"TB is endemic, malaria is endemic... they kill millions of people every year. Please don't think endemic means 'it's over' and 'it's mild'," a- he insisted.
Once certain diseases become, over time, endemic, he also said, they tend to become childhood diseases, such as measles and diphtheria.
But if vaccination levels drop in the population - as is the case with measles, "we see epidemics picking up again because protection levels in the population drop," the WHO official observed.
The WHO Emergency Committee on Covid-19 was unanimous this week in believing that this was not "the time to let our guard down".
The organization's director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, therefore maintained the public health emergency of international concern for Covid-19 on Wednesday, the WHO's highest alert level.
According to the latest weekly report on the epidemiological situation published by the WHO on Tuesday, the number of Covid cases continued to fall for the third week in a row.
The number of deaths also fell compared to the previous week.
© 2022 AFP