WHO to decide if COVID remains an emergency. What will this mean for Canada?

As the WHO mulls whether COVID-19 remains an emergency, some health experts say COVID is still a public health threat and measures to combat it in Canada should continue.  

As a World Health Organization committee mulls whether COVID-19 remains an international emergency, some health experts say regardless of what is decided, the virus is still a public health threat and measures to combat and contain it in Canada should continue.

The WHO Emergency Committee has met 14 times over the last three years since the UN agency first declared COVID-19 a public health emergency of international concern in January 2020 to determine whether the designation — its highest level of alert — should remain.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Friday that while the global situation has improved, a recent increase in the number of deaths and large-scale outbreaks in China are concerning.

“As we enter the fourth year of the pandemic, we are certainly in a much better position now than we were a year ago, when the Omicron wave was at its peak and more than 70,000 deaths were being reported to WHO each week,” he said in his opening remarks to the Emergency Committee meeting in Geneva Friday.

“However, since the beginning of December, the number of weekly reported deaths globally has been rising… last week, almost 40,000 deaths were reported to WHO, more than half of them from China.

In total, more than 170,000 deaths have been reported in the last eight weeks, a number that, in reality, is “certainly much higher,” Tedros said, pointing to a massive global drop in testing, surveillance and reporting of the virus.

But whether this reversal of progress means the WHO will continue to keep its highest alert in place for SARS‑CoV‑2 remains unknown, in part because there is no official WHO criteria or process to determine when a public health emergency of international concern ends.

This differs from when an emergency is declared, as there are criteria under international health regulations that must be met, including the need for an internationally-coordinated response to a public health threat that is “sudden” and in need of redress, says Maxwell Smith, assistant professor in the faculty of health sciences at Western University.