WHO says COVID-19 global emergency isn’t over. What does that mean for you?

WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned that in the last eight weeks, at least 170,000 people have died around the world in connection with the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

The World Health Organization decided Monday not to end to the COVID-19 global public health emergency it declared three years ago, even though the pandemic has reached what the international body calls an “inflection point.”

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the WHO, said Monday “there is no doubt that we’re in a far better situation now” than a year ago, when the highly transmissible Omicron variant was at its peak.

But Tedros warned that in the last eight weeks, at least 170,000 people have died around the world in connection with the SARS-CoV-2 virus. He called for at-risk groups to be fully vaccinated, an increase in testing and early use of antivirals, an expansion of lab networks, and a fight against “misinformation” about the pandemic.

“We remain hopeful that in the coming year, the world will transition to a new phase in which we reduce hospitalizations and deaths to the lowest possible level,” he said.

By declaring a global emergency, the WHO essentially sounded the alarm on a serious worldwide health risk that required international co-operation.

It triggered a legally binding response among WHO member countries, including Canada, and allowed the organization to make temporary recommendations to those countries to prevent or deal with the threat.

But in the three years since COVID-19 was designated an emergency, workers have begun to go back to the office, public health restrictions have lifted and masks are no longer mandatory in most places. Life is starting to resemble the pre-pandemic reality.

In Canada, public health officials credit this slow return to normalcy to the high rate of vaccination among Canadians, and the availability of therapeutic drugs to prevent and treat serious cases of infection.