The world is waiting with bated breath for the final decision of a panel of global health experts that met on Thursday, 4 May, to decide whether or not COVID-19 is still a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) under the World Health Organisation (WHO) rules.
WHO Director-General, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, is expected to make the decision public in the coming days.
This is coming at a time the world seems to have moved on from COVID-19, with the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) planning for the federal Public Health Emergency (PHE) for COVID-19, declared under Section 319 of the Public Health Service (PHS) Act, to expire at the end of the day on May 11, 2023 “based on current COVID-19 trends”.
WHO declared COVID-19 a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) on 30 January 2020 and characterized the outbreak as a pandemic on 11 March 2020 after the novel coronavirus (nCoV) quickly spread to other countries across the world following the detection of the first cases of the virus in China in December 2019.
Since then, there have been 765,222,932 confirmed cases of Covid-19 and 6,921,614 deaths globally reported to WHO as of 4:16pm CEST, 3 May 2023. Europe has recorded the highest number of confirmed infections with 275,974,801 cases, while Africa has the lowest number with 9,525,097 cases. A total of 13,344,670,055 vaccine doses have also been administered as of 30 April 2023, according to information from WHO.
In March this year, WHO Director-General said the world was “certainly in a much better position now than we have been at any time during the pandemic” and expressed optimism that COVID-19 would be over as a public health emergency this year.
“I am confident that this year we will be able to say that COVID-19 is over as a public health emergency of international concern,” Tedros said during a briefing. “We are not there yet.”
Ahead of Thursday’s meeting of a panel of experts, some experts said there were still reasons for the virus to be categorised as a global public health emergency, but advisors to the WHO and external experts told Reuters that there was as yet no consensus on which way the panel may rule.
“It is possible that the emergency may end, but it is critical to communicate that COVID remains a complex public health challenge,” said Prof Marion Koopmans, a Dutch virologist who is on the WHO panel.
Channelnewsasia.com (CNA) quotes Dr Annelies Wilder-Smith, visiting professor at the Nanyang Technological University’s Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine, as saying that there were some advantages in continuing to categorise COVID-19 as a public health emergency.
“You keep the political will, you keep the international coordination, and it also enables mechanisms like the use of Emergency Use Listing and Emergency Use Authorization for vaccines,” she told CNA’s World Tonight on Friday.
The WHO Emergency Use Listing procedure expedites the availability of new products, and is a signal to national regulators on its safety and efficacy.
Some may argue for its lifting as the world is at a stage of the pandemic where the cases are coming down, there are fewer deaths, and there is a high level of immunity among the world population, Dr Wilder-Smith noted.
“I think we are soon at the stage where COVID should not be a unique disease anymore. It can now be integrated in the general infrastructure and should be treated like other diseases such as influenza,” she said.
“The problem with COVID is obviously we are still learning about this virus. It has always surprised us. It could surprise us again. And so we need to remain vigilant.”
Dr Ben Cowling, chair professor of epidemiology at the University of Hong Kong’s School of Public Health, told CNA’s Asia Tonight on Thursday that while the world is no longer in a state of emergency like earlier in the pandemic, it is still “not yet the right time to sound all clear”.
He noted that there are rising hospitalisation numbers in many parts of Asia, with Vietnam’s capital of Hanoi reintroducing the mandatory wearing of masks.
Rather than just declaring whether COVID-19 is an emergency or not, Dr Cowling suggested that there could be a new five-point scale that grades the intensity across a spectrum.
“I think we do need to find a more sustainable approach because we can’t keep the emergency in place forever,” Dr Cowling said.
“Things like booster vaccinations are things we are going to have to administer every year, and find strategies to get booster vaccination coverage up to higher levels so that we can prevent more of those hospitalisations,” he said.
