The World Health Organization ended the Covid-19 global health emergency on Friday, saying it was time for countries to transition from treating Covid as an emergency to dealing with it as a disease that is here to stay.
The decision was made on the advice of a panel of independent experts, the so-called Covid-19 emergency committee, which met Thursday.
“It’s … with great hope that I declare Covid-19 over as a global health emergency,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said during a news conference from Geneva. He warned, though, that the threat the virus causes remains.
The Covid-19 Public Health Emergency of International Concern has been in effect since Jan. 30, 2020. Since the start of the pandemic, the WHO estimates that at least 20 million people around the world have died from the new disease.
“Covid has changed our world and it has changed us,” Tedros said. “If we all go back to the way we were before Covid-19, we will have failed to learn its lessons and we will have failed future generations.”
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