WHO maintains public health emergency on COVID but sees pandemic at 'transition point'
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The World Health Organization (WHO) said on Monday that the COVID-19 continues to constitute a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC).
The WHO Director-General Tedros Ghebreyesus agreed with the advice offered at the meeting of the International Health Regulations (IHR) Emergency Committee.
The committee views that the COVID-19 pandemic is probably at a transition point and advised to navigate the transition carefully and mitigate the potential negative consequences.
The committee added that that pandemic may be approaching an inflexion point and achieving higher levels of population immunity globally, either through infection and/or vaccination, may limit the impact of the virus on mortality, but there is little doubt that this virus will remain a permanently established pathogen in humans and animals for the foreseeable future.
The panel noted that eliminating the virus from human and animal reservoirs is highly unlikely, mitigation of its devastating impact on morbidity and mortality is achievable
The week also marked the three-year anniversary of the determination of the COVID-19 PHEIC in January 2020.
The panel said that while the world is in a better position than it was during the peak of the Omicron transmission a year ago, more than 170K COVID-related deaths were reported globally within the last eight weeks.
Surveillance and genetic sequencing have declined globally, making it difficult to track known variants and detect new ones, the panel added.
The WHO Secretariat expressed concern about the substantial decrease in Member States' reporting of data related to COVID-19 morbidity, mortality, hospitalization and sequencing, and reiterated the importance of timely data sharing to guide the pandemic response.
The committee noted that it was informed that, globally, 13.1B doses of COVID vaccines were administered, with 89% of health workers and 81% of older adults (over 60 years) having completed the primary series.
Among the recommendations made by Ghebreyesus were to maintain momentum for COVID vaccination to achieve 100% coverage of high-priority groups via the use of booster doses. To improve reporting of SARS-CoV-2 surveillance data to WHO and increase uptake and availability of medical countermeasures, among other things.
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