The World Health Organization decreed this Friday that Covid-19 is no longer a global health emergency, despite the fact that it has killed “at least 20 million people” worldwide.
“It has been 1,221 days since we heard for the first time about a series of cases of pneumonia with unknown causes in Wuhan, China,” explained the leader of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyeus, who recalls having declared an “international public health emergency” on the 30th. from January. , 2020.
In three years, “it went around the world and almost seven million deaths were reported, but we know that the figure is much higher, at least 20 million.”
“Over the last year, the emergency committee and the WHO have been carefully analyzing the data, considering when would be the right time to lower the alarm level. Yesterday, the emergency committee met for the fifteenth time and recommended that I declare the end of the world emergency. I took that advice,” he announced.
Even so, the official warned that this “does not mean that Covid-19 is no longer a threat to global health” and stressed that, last week, the disease “claimed a life every three minutes, and these are only the deaths known”. .
“The virus is here to stay, it continues to kill and continues to change, the risk of new variants emerging that causes new spikes in infections and deaths continues”, so “the worst thing that each country can do is use this news to lower the guard”. , dismantle the systems you have built or tell your citizens that Covid-19 should no longer worry them.”
Now, he explained, it is time for countries “to move from an emergency mode to a mode of handling Covid-19 separate from other infectious diseases.”
And yet, despite the end of the emergency, Tedros guarantees: “If necessary, I will not hesitate to convene another emergency committee if Covid-19 threatens our world again.”
“A victory” that leaves “inheritance”
For Miguel Castanho, a researcher at the Institute of Molecular Medicine, this is a historic moment. “Of course, one day the pandemic would end,” he says in TSF.
“The 1918 pandemic also ended without us having the technological power that we have today, but in 1918 it ended because the virus hit everyone, killed a lot of people, and it ended naturally because there was no one to fight.” , something “very different” from the case of Covid-19.
It is “a victory, not because one day ended, but because we managed to resist, managing to greatly reduce the impact of the virus”, through the vaccines that could be developed and the exchange of information about the virus among the scientific community. .
Added to these factors was the alert and mobilization of the population for “defensive behaviors”, a “remaining legacy”, he points out, for the future of the fight against pandemics, “because surely this will not be the last”.
Better vaccine distribution could have reduced deaths
Speaking to TSFThe pulmonologist and coordinator of the crisis office of the Order of Physicians for Covid-19, Filipe Froes, has indicated that the estimate of another 20 million deaths could be lower “if we had had a greater capacity to distribute the vaccine, with equitable criteria”. , on a global scale”.
This, he regrets, was not possible and it is one of the “great lessons” that the WHO drew from this pandemic to apply to others that may happen: “A faster, fairer and more equitable response, to guarantee the protection of all” . in a more balanced way.
In a pandemic, “our health does not depend only on us, it also depends on the defense of others and we all depend on each other to combat a threat on a global scale.”
Source: TSF
