WHO, the Covid emergency is over. Twenty million dead in three years – Healthcare

The WHO Technical Committee, said director general Tedros Ghrebreyesus, “recommended the end of the state of emergency and I accepted the indication”. The state of international health emergency was declared on January 30, 2020.

THE CONFERENCE

“This is a moment to celebrate – Ghebreyesus said – but it is also a moment to reflect. The idea of ​​the potential threat of other pandemics must remain. We now have tools and technologies to prepare for pandemics better and recognize them sooner, but globally a lack coordination could undermine those tools. Lives have been lost that shouldn’t have been lost, we promise our children and grandchildren that we will never make the same mistakes again.”

“Since the beginning of the pandemic, outside China – added the WHO dg – there were about 100 cases of Covid-19 and there were no deaths declared. In the three years since when the world has turned upside down: about 7 millions of deaths have been reported by WHO, but we know that the estimate is many times greater, equal to at least 20 million deaths”.

“It is with great hope that I now declare the end of Covid-19 a global health emergency, but still this does not mean that Covid is over in terms of global health threat.” WHO director general Tedros Ghebreyesus said at a press conference. “The risk of new emerging variants that can cause new waves of cases and deaths remains. The worst thing that countries can do now – he warned – is to use this news to lower their guard, to dismantle the system they have built and to launch to people the message that Covid is no longer something to worry about”. “As we speak – said Ghebreyesus – thousands of people around the world are fighting for their lives in intensive care and millions continue to live with the debilitating effects of the condition post-Covid. The virus is here to stay. It’s still killing and it’s still changing.” Covid, added Ghebreyesus, “has been much more than a health crisis: it has caused economic upheaval, wiping out trillions from GDP and pushing millions into poverty. It has caused social upheaval, with border closures and millions of people affected by isolation, depression and anxiety. The pandemic has now been on a downward trend for more than a year, with immunization increasing and mortality decreasing with less pressure on health systems. This has allowed many countries to return to life as we knew it before the pandemic”.

Doctors’ orders: the disease has not disappeared
“The numbers of Covid infections around the world are falling and therefore this disease is substantially reduced from being a pandemic to an endemic disease, that is, always present in the territory. The WHO has decided to ‘downgrade’ in this respect, under the numerical aspect, this disease. However, the disease continues to be one of the dreaded pathologies because it still causes deaths in our country today”. Thus the president of Fnomceo, the national federation of medical orders, Filippo Anelli, comments on the decision of the World Health Organization to declare the end of the international health emergency. He does it in a video for Fnomceo Tg Sanità, released in preview. “Obviously – clarifies Anelli – the message is not to think that the disease has disappeared, but to think that the return to normal life sometimes makes us encounter this disease too. And this disease naturally produces its effects above all for the frail, who must remember to always protect themselves: and here the use of masks becomes somehow still important today”. “Minister Schillaci is very good – adds the president of Fnomceo – who has entrusted the decision on the use of masks to the health professionals, in particular to the health departments and then to the individual professionals. A decision which naturally can only be to protect the frail, especially immunosuppressed patients, the elderly.So the doctor must use this discretion on the basis of evidence, of guidelines that can in some way help him in his decision to impose the obligation to wear a mask especially where the conditions they favor the spread of the virus towards the weakest people”.