WHO to keep highest alert over COVID as ‘public health emergency of international concern’ – Saudi Gazette

WHO to keep highest alert over COVID as ‘public health emergency of international concern’ – Saudi Gazette

GENEVA — On Jan. 30 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared that COVID-19 — the infectious disease which was spreading like wildfire around the world, killing thousands and, later, millions — was a public health emergency of international concern.

Now exactly three years later, despite a drop in mortality linked to coronavirus cases, especially in the Western world, the agency has decided to maintain the same high alert on the disease, declaring it remains a global health emergency.

On Monday, the agency said that though the pandemic was likely at a “transition point,” we still need careful management to “mitigate the potential negative consequences”.

While cases have dropped in countries where a majority of the population has been vaccinated and the world “is in a better position than it was during the peak of the Omicron transmission one year ago,” a statement from the WHO meeting reads, more than 170,000 COVID-19-related deaths have been reported globally in the last eight weeks.

Data on new infections have become harder to come by as tracking has declined globally in the past months, making it harder to follow the spread of variants and detect new variants, said WHO.

While a large part of the world has drawn