Is COVID-19 still a global health emergency?

Open this photo in gallery:

On Jan. 30, 2020, the World Health Organization declared a burgeoning outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 a public health emergency of international concern, setting off alarm bells around the world.

Three years later, a special committee of the World Health Organization has determined, almost reluctantly it seems, that COVID-19 remains a PHEIC (pronounced “fake,” to the delight of COVID deniers).

The expert panel said the pandemic “may be reaching an inflection point,” where higher levels of immunity – from both vaccination and infection – mean that the risk of serious illness and death after being infected are falling.

It also noted that one of the principal reasons it maintained the PHEIC was the message it might send if it did not, and this was interpreted as meaning COVID is no longer a threat.

WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Monday that the situation is much better today than a year ago and he “acknowledges the committee’s view that the COVID-19 pandemic is probably at a transition point and appreciates the advice of the committee to navigate this transition carefully and mitigate the potential negative consequences.”

The message here is that while things are looking up, the pandemic is not quite over. More importantly, it’s a recognition the WHO and its member countries don’t have a transition plan to a near-future where SARS-CoV-2 will be endemic.

But developing such a plan is difficult in a world where there is an overwhelming desire to move on, at least politically, and where the loudest voices are at the extremes, the COVID deniers and alarmists.

There has been a sharp drop in COVID-19 mitigation measures in virtually every country. Even China, after years of draconian rules, had adopted a let ‘er rip approach.

This laissez-faire approach has led to stagnating interest in vaccination – though the WHO noted that a staggering 13.1 billion doses had been administered worldwide.

Countries have also rolled back collection of data on COVID cases. Surveillance using testing (of people and waste water) has fallen sharply, and so too has genetic sequencing, making it far more difficult to detect and track new variants.

The indifference shows in the mortality numbers.

Globally, COVID-19 peaked at about 70,000 deaths a week. That was a year ago, as the Omicron variant ripped around the world.

By October, deaths had fallen to their lowest point since the early days of the pandemic, about 10,000 weekly.

But the numbers have been climbing steadily since, reaching about 40,000 worldwide last week.

All told, there have been 6.8 million officially recorded deaths and the true toll is likely about three times that number, about 21.5 million dead.

Canada also silently crossed a grim milestone last week – 50,000 pandemic deaths – and is still registering more than 30 deaths daily. COVID-19 has been the third leading cause of death in this country (after cancer and cardiovascular disease) for three years running.

We haven’t seen infectious disease death on this scale since the Great Influenza more than a century ago, when the Spanish flu killed about 50,000 Canadians. (The country’s population was eight million then, and it’s 38 million now so, proportionally, it was much worse.)

We’ve known all along that the pandemic was never going to end abruptly but, rather, gradually subside.

So, if we’re at an inflection/transition point, what do we do now to ease the pain?

Clearly, we need to focus on protecting high-risk groups, namely elders and the immunocompromised. The WHO committee says, for example, that COVID shots should be incorporated into routine immunization schedules for these groups.

Measures such as improving ventilation, especially in public spaces such as schools and community halls, need to be ongoing, because they will protect us not only from COVID-19 but other respiratory illnesses, existing and coming.

We also have to get serious about caring for those harmed by the pandemic, namely long COVID sufferers. The emergency may be winding down, but not the need for care.

And, of course, there needs to be a determined effort to combat the torrent of misinformation and disinformation, which have done untold harm during this pandemic and which could have even more frightening impacts when the next pandemic threat emerges.

The public health emergency of international concern, when it was declared three years ago, was meant to raise the alarm. But, as we head into year four of COVID, alarm fatigue has set in.

The challenge now is managing a constant, low-level background threat rather than a headline-grabbing one.