The World Health Organization on Friday officially declared that COVID-19 is no longer a global health emergency, some three years after citizens around the world were called to stay indoors and embrace social distancing in a bid to curb the spread of a virus that once killed thousands of people per day.
“COVID-19 has been so much more than a health crisis, disrupting economies, travel, shattering businesses and plunging millions into poverty,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters during a press conference Friday.
WHO’s International Health Regulations Emergency Committee discussed the pandemic on Thursday during its 15th meeting on the subject. At its end, they recommended Ghebreyesus downgrade its emergency status.
“For more than a year the pandemic has been on a downward trend. This trend has allowed most countries to return to life as we knew it before COVID-19,” he continued. “Therefore, with great hope, I declare COVID-19 over as a global health emergency.”
The World Health Organization also emphasized that while the emergency is over, the pandemic itself is not. The agency noted thousands of people are still dying every week and specifically pointed to a recent spike in cases in Southeast Asia and the Middle East.
Hundreds more are also still suffering from the disease’s long-term effects.
The initial emergency declaration — the public health emergency of international concern or PHEIC — was issued on Jan. 30, 2020. At the time, there were fewer than 10,000 cases of the virus, most of them in China.
On Dec. 31, 2019, government officials in the Chinese city of Wuhan confirmed that health authorities were treating several cases of “pneumonia of unknown cause.” Just a few days later, researchers in China identified a new virus that had infected dozens of people across Asia. In the years since, nearly 7 million have died from COVID-19.
A PHEIC signals an agreement between countries to adhere to WHO’s recommendations in the event of a global crisis. Each country, in turn, declares its own public health emergency and uses them to organize resources and implement rules to better handle consequences of a pandemic or similar issue.
The United States is set to let its COVID-19 public health emergency end on May 11.