The WHO has indicated that Covid-19 will soon be a “prevented and treated” disease like the flu.
Three years after classifying Covid-19 as a global pandemic, WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said he was “confident” that this year Covid will cease to be a “health” problem. public, an international emergency”.
According to the director of the WHO, there were, last week, 5,000 deaths attributed to Covid-19. “It’s 5,000 too many for a pathology that can be prevented and treated”. But Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus is “convinced that this year we can say that Covid-19 has ended as a public health emergency of international importance”.
And for the WHO, Covid-19 will be, from this year, a disease which can be “prevented and treated” as can be “seasonal flu”.
It is vaccination, previous infections but also increasingly developing treatments that have brought Covid-19 to such a low level of lethality and that will make it possible to end the pandemic state.
Since the start of the pandemic, Covid-19 has killed approximately 7 million people, or nearly 2.5 million per year. As a reminder, the flu kills approximately 650,000 people per year worldwide, according to WHO data.
In the meantime, WHO urges countries to learn lessons from Covid-19 and agree ‘to work cooperatively with each other, not in competition, to prepare for and respond to epidemics and pandemics “.
