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.
“I think we’re getting to the point where we can look at COVID-19 the same way we look at seasonal flu, which is a health threat, a virus that will continue to kill, but a virus that doesn’t disrupt our society or our hospital systems,” WHO emergency program chief Michael Ryan told a news 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 declared this “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.
“We had declared a global health emergency to urge countries to take decisive action, but not all did,” he recalled on Friday.
“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.