Geneva, Dec 14, (dpa/GNA) – The World Health Organization (WHO) is optimistic, that the global health emergency due to the coronavirus pandemic can be lifted in 2023.
The hope is to be able to say next year: “This is not a pandemic anymore,” WHO head Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said in Geneva on Wednesday. He added however: “The virus is here to stay.”
He said,”however, the world has the tools – vaccines, medicines and codes of conduct – to deal with it.’
The number of cases of Mpox, as monkeypox has been renamed, has also fallen by more than 90%, and there have been no new cases of Ebola in Uganda for a while now, Tedros said.
Looking ahead to 2023, he said, “There are many reasons for hope and many reasons for concern.” He mentioned, among other things, looming famine, especially in Africa, continuing poor sanitation in many places, unhealthy diets, and malaria and tuberculosis.
The WHO cannot declare a pandemic “over.” The term pandemic does not even appear in the WHO’s toolkit, the International Health Regulations (IHR). It can only lift the “public health emergency of international concern” (PHEIC) described therein and declared at the end of 2020 because of the coronavirus.
The declaration of an emergency is primarily intended to wake up governments, so that they take protective measures and cooperate. However, each country imposes conditions separately.
A lifting of anti-coronavirus regulations in Germany, for example, is not conditional on the WHO lifting the emergency. An independent council of experts regularly examines the global situation, and recommends to the WHO whether an emergency should be lifted or maintained.
GNA