This Friday, the World Health Organization (WHO) acknowledged the reduction in the maximum alert level in place for Covid-19 this year, saying the impact of the disease could soon be compared to that of seasonal flu.
“I think we are getting to the point where we can look at Covid-19 the same way we look at seasonal flu, which is a health threat, a virus that will continue to kill but not destroy societies or systems. hospitals,” Michael Ryan, head of WHO emergency programs, said at a press conference.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus expressed “a very welcome impression that for the first time the weekly number of deaths reported over the past four weeks was lower” than when a pandemic was declared three years ago.
“We are certainly in a much better position than at any other time during the pandemic,” assured the head of the organization, who was still “confident” that WHO could lower the maximum warning level “this year” for covid. -19.
The WHO moved forward with the level of an international public health emergency on January 30, 2020, when there were less than 100 cases worldwide and no deaths outside of China, but the pandemic situation was only declared in March of that year.
“We declared a global health emergency to call on countries to take decisive action, but not everyone did so,” admitted Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, noting that three years later, the number of deaths caused by the coronavirus exceeds almost seven million. officially registered in the world.
At the end of January, the WHO director-general decided to maintain the maximum level of preparedness for Covid-19 after another meeting of his emergency committee, a body that meets periodically to assess the situation of the pandemic, but experts acknowledged that a “tipping point” was approaching.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, more than 760 million cases and about 6.8 million deaths from covid-19 have been recorded worldwide, according to the organization’s latest figures released on Thursday.
Between February 13 and March 12, there were nearly 4.1 million new infections and 28,000 deaths, down 40% and 57%, respectively, from the previous 28 days worldwide.
In Europe, the WHO says more than 1.5 million new cases have been reported, up 20% from the previous 28 days, but the number of deaths has dropped by 26% to 9,274 reported deaths.
However, the WHO acknowledges that infections and re-infections are underreported, partly due to reduced testing and reporting delays in many countries.
Covid-19 is an infectious respiratory disease caused by SARS-CoV-2, a type of virus that was discovered three years ago in China and has rapidly spread around the world, taking on several variants and subvariants, some more contagious than others.