“WHO Experts to Review COVID-19 Alert Level in Emergency Committee Meeting”

corona

The World Health Organization’s Emergency Committee on COVID-19 is set to begin new discussions Thursday to decide whether the organization should maintain the maximum level of preparedness to confront the pandemic.

This meeting is the 15th for the expert committee since the WHO declared on January 30, 2020 the “State of International Public Health Emergency (USPPI)” the organization’s highest level of preparedness.

The committee, chaired by French physician Didier Hussein, meets every three months to recommend whether or not this level of alert should be maintained, provided that the final decision is taken by the Director-General of the organization, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

Days before the previous meeting at the end of January, Tedros announced that he considered it too early to raise the higher alert level.

But this time he didn’t say anything.

While the number of deaths related to COVID-19 has decreased by 95% since January, WHO officials have repeatedly expressed regret that virus monitoring activities, such as infection detection tests and genetic sequencing, have declined significantly in the world, which complicates tracking the development of the epidemic.

During the period from March 27 to April 23, the epidemic caused the death of at least 16,000 people.

“While the number of cases and deaths reported each week is at its lowest levels since the beginning of the pandemic, millions of people are still infected with Covid and the infection is repeated (…) and thousands of people die every week,” the organization stated on Wednesday.

In the new strategy of the World Health Organization to combat Covid-19 for the period from 2023 to 2025, which was revealed on Wednesday, Tedros stressed that the world is currently going through a moment of “hope and uncertainty” in the face of the development of the pandemic.

He added that the new strategy “maintains these two goals and adds a third goal: to support countries that move from responding to an emergency situation to managing, controlling and preventing the disease in the longer term.”

On January 30, 2020, the World Health Organization sounded the alarm, but countries did not take all measures to confront the spread of the epidemic until Tedros declared Covid-19 a “pandemic”, but the virus had spread quickly and aggressively.

Since then, several vaccines have appeared, of which more than 13.3 billion doses have been administered so far.

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