The COVID issue is still at the highest level of alert, according to the World Health Organization, and despite recent advances, the epidemic still constitutes a worldwide health emergency.
Following a meeting last week, the WHO’s COVID-19 emergency committee came to the conclusion that the pandemic continues to be a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC), a position it first designated in January 2020.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director of the WHO, told reporters on Wednesday that he agreed with their recommendations.
Speaking from the UN health agency’s headquarters in Geneva, he said, “The committee emphasized the need to increase monitoring and expand access to tests, treatments, and vaccines for those most at risk.”
On January 30, 2020, the WHO first designated the COVID-19 outbreak as a PHEIC with less than 100 cases and no confirmed fatalities outside of China.
Even though this is the standard way for the international community to respond to such outbreaks, many countries didn’t know about the threat until March, when Tedros called the situation a pandemic.
More than 6.5 million deaths and over 622 million confirmed COVID cases have been reported to WHO since the pandemic began, although it is thought that these figures are significantly understated.
The WHO’s worldwide dashboard of the situation shows that there were 263,000 new cases and 856 new deaths of Covids in just the last day.
But Tedros warned that “the virus continues to change, and there are still many risks and unknowns,” even though “the situation around the world has definitely gotten better since the pandemic began.”
He cautioned that “the pandemic has startled us before and very well could again.”
Monitoring has decreased,
The WHO’s COVID-19 technical head, Maria Van Kerkhove, concurred and issued a warning that “millions of cases are still being reported each week, but our surveillance has decreased.”
Due to this, it is challenging to acquire a complete picture of the situation, particularly with regard to how the virus is evolving.
“The more this virus spreads, the more opportunities it has to change,” she emphasized.
There are more than 300 sublineages of the Omicron variety, which makes up nearly all sequenced viral samples.
Van Kerkove says that “all of the Omicron subvariants show improved transmissibility and signs of immune escape,” and that a new combination of two different subvariants showed “significant immune evasion.”
“We need to make sure that the vaccines used globally continue to be effective at preventing serious illness and death; therefore, this is a concern for us,” she said.
Van Kerkhove stressed that, because new Omicron subvariants are so common, “countries need to be able to do surveillance to deal with rises in cases and maybe even rises in hospitalizations.”
“We must continue to be watchful.”
