The World Health Organization on Wednesday said that COVID-19 remains a pandemic and a public health emergency of international concern.
“While the global situation has obviously improved since the pandemic began, the virus continues to change, and there remain many risks and uncertainties,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a press briefing on Wednesday. “This pandemic has surprised us before and very well could again.”
Tedros said that he accepted the recommendation to keep the public health emergency of international concern declaration from WHO’s emergency committee for COVID-19, which met last week.
“The committee emphasized the need to strengthen surveillance and expand access to tests, treatments and vaccines for those most at-risk, and for all countries to update their national preparedness and response plans,” Tedros said.
While WHO has been adamant that the pandemic is not over, Tedros has said that the end is in sight.
But the organization doesn’t decide whether an outbreak is a pandemic or not. Instead, it decides if events are a public health emergency of international concern, which it declared for COVID-19 in January 2020.
The committee did, however, discuss for the first time the possibility of terminating the emergency declaration, citing declining deaths and increasing immunity levels, according to Didier Houssin, who is the chair of WHO’s emergency committee for COVID-19. But he said it is still “too early” to end the declaration given that deaths remain elevated and uncertainties remain.
Houssin said that the committee decided on preliminary steps needed before it can lift the declaration, including watching how winter plays in the Northern Hemisphere and examining how ending the declaration would affect access to vaccines and therapies.
