WHO Mulls Whether To Lift Covid Emergency Status
Dwindling Covid deaths may have allowed “normal” life to largely resume but uncertainties persist, the WHO chief said Thursday, as experts debated if the global health emergency should be declared over.
The World Health Organization’s emergency committee’s 15th meeting on the crisis comes more than three years after the UN health agency on January 30, 2020 first sounded its highest level of alarm over what was then called the novel coronavirus.
The independent committee meets every three months to discuss the pandemic and reports to WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who then decides whether Covid-19 remains a so-called public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC) — the highest level of alert.
The emergency committee meeting, chaired by French doctor Didier Houssin, kicked off shortly after noon (1000 GMT) and was due to last all afternoon, although the outcome was unlikely to be published Thursday.
It remains unclear which way the experts will lean.
Speaking to the experts at the start of Thursday’s closed-door meeting, Tedros recalled that during their last meeting in January they had noted that the number of weekly deaths from Covid was declining following a spike in China after it lifted restrictions late last year.
