COVID-19 will soon be comparable to the threat of seasonal flu, said Friday the World Health Organization (WHO), which hopes to lower its maximum alert level again this year.
The WHO has also again asked Beijing to be more transparent in sharing data on COVID. The accusations come after international experts discovered that China had published online – before recently removing it for an undetermined reason – new genetic data on samples taken in January 2020 from the market in Wuhan, the city where the virus was detected for the first time.
Three years after the start of COVID, its origin still remains a mystery.
In the meantime, “I think we’re getting to the point where we can consider [la] COVID-19 in the same way we view seasonal flu, namely a health threat, a virus that will continue to kill, but a virus that does not disrupt our society or our hospital systems,” said the head of programs. WHO Emergency Response, Michael Ryan, at a press conference.
Alongside him, WHO Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said he was “very pleased to note that, for the first time, the weekly number of deaths reported over the past four weeks has been below the one recorded when we first used the word “pandemic” three years ago.”
“We are certainly in a much better position today than at any time during the pandemic,” he observed.
He thus showed himself “confident” that the WHO could lower its maximum alert level “this year”.
The WHO had declared a “public health emergency of international concern” on January 30, 2020 — when the world had fewer than 100 cases and no deaths outside of China — but it wasn’t until Dr Tedros called the pandemic situation, in March 2020, that the world had taken full measure of the seriousness of the health threat.
raccoon dog
“Three years later, nearly seven million deaths from [à la] COVID-19 have been reported, although we know that the number of deaths due [à la] COVID-19 is higher,” he said.
And “even if we have more and more hope for the end of the pandemic, the question of how it started remains unanswered”, he noted.
In this regard, he pointed the finger at China which, without warning the WHO, published at the end of January – then removed from the world’s largest database on SARS-CoV-2 sequences (Gisaid) – data which could potentially shed light on the origin of COVID for scientists.
It was only last Sunday that the WHO was informed of this, not by China, but by scientists. The data, which comes from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, relates to samples taken from Huanan market in Wuhan in 2020, including from raccoon dogs.
These data, which scientists were able to download and analyze while they were online, “do not provide a definitive answer to the question of how the pandemic started”, explained Dr Tedros, but they “could have — and had to — be shared three years ago”.
“We continue to ask China to be transparent in sharing data,” he insisted.
“We have asked the Chinese CDC to make this data accessible in its entirety,” said Dr Maria Van Kerkhove, in charge of the fight against [la] COVID at WHO.
Transmission to humans by an intermediate animal present on the Wuhan market or laboratory leak, several theories circulate on the origin of COVID.
The new Chinese data brings additional elements, estimated Ms Van Kerkhove, but many questions still remain open, in particular on the animals sold on the market of the Chinese city: were they domestic animals or not and where did they come from?