Today, Monday, the World Health Organization decided to maintain the maximum state of emergency regarding the “Covid-19” epidemic, 3 years after declaring the disease a health emergency of global proportions.
The Director-General of the Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, followed the recommendations of the Emergency Committee on "Covid-19", which is a committee of experts that met Friday for the 14th time, according to a statement.
On January 30, 2020, the committee declared that Covid-19 constituted a "public health emergency on an international scale", while at that time only less than 100 cases were recorded outside China without any deaths.
Ghebreyesus had previously confirmed that the abolition of the maximum state of emergency was "premature".
He said Monday, during a regular press conference in Geneva, "Although I do not want to preempt the opinion of the emergency committee, I remain very concerned about the situation in several countries and the increasing number of deaths."
"My message is clear: do not underestimate this virus, it has surprised us and will continue to surprise us and will continue to kill us unless we do more to provide health facilities to those in need and to combat disinformation globally," he added.
The Director-General of the UN organization has the power to choose whether or not to follow the recommendation of the Emergency Committee.
The health emergency, which bore a complex name, failed to convince the authorities and the public of the seriousness of the situation in January 2020, which allowed the use of the term "pandemic" on March 11 by the head of the World Health Organization.
After 3 years, the Committee considers that the "COVID-19 pandemic" may have reached a "transitional phase", and the Director-General said he appreciates "the Committee's recommendations to move with caution during this transitional phase and mitigate potential negative consequences."
170 thousand deaths
And on Friday, the Director-General of the World Health Organization indicated, in his opening speech at the beginning of the meeting, that "the number of deaths recorded per week in the world has increased since the beginning of December."
He added, "The lifting of restrictions in China has led to an increase in the number of deaths in the world's most populous country" during the week from January 16 to January 22, explaining that among the nearly 40,000 deaths due to Covid reported by the World Health Organization, "were recorded More than half of them are in China.
The epidemic has killed 170,000 people in the past two months.
Ghebreyesus regretted that there were only a small number of people who had been properly vaccinated and that the surveillance and genetic sequencing that allowed tracking the evolution and transmission of the virus had declined sharply.
The virus caused the death of 6 million and 804 thousand and 491 people and infected more than 752 million people as of January 27, according to the organization, but the UN agency and experts believe that the numbers are actually much higher.