WHO declares an end to the COVID-19 global health emergency
More than three years after it began, the World Health Organization said the pandemic no longer constituted a global emergency, while warning the virus was here to stay.
The World Health Organization declared an end to COVID-19 as a global health emergency on Friday, formally closing a chapter that had lasted more than three years and killed millions of people worldwide.
Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the decision followed a steady decline in deaths and hospitalisations and growing immunity from vaccination and infection, which together had allowed most countries to return to life as it was before the pandemic. But he cautioned that the end of the emergency did not mean the virus was no longer a threat.
"This virus is here to stay," he said, noting that it continued to circulate, mutate and kill, and urging governments not to dismantle the systems they had built to track and respond to it. The official global death toll stood in the millions, though the WHO estimated the true figure, counting excess deaths, was far higher.
The emergency had been declared in early 2020, triggering lockdowns, border closures and an unprecedented global scientific effort that produced vaccines in record time. Its lifting marked the transition from crisis to a long-term management of the disease as one among many ongoing health concerns.
Officials used the moment to call for reflection on the lessons of the pandemic — on preparedness, on the unequal distribution of vaccines, and on the need to invest in health systems — so that the world might respond more effectively to the next global outbreak, whenever it came.