WHO Declares Global COVID-19 Public Health Emergency Over

The global COVID-19 health emergency is now over, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Specifically, the WHO says that “COVID-19 is now an established and ongoing health issue which no longer constitutes a public health emergency of international concern.”

This comes more than three years after the organization first declared that the outbreak of the coronavirus responsible for COVID-19 constituted a public health emergency of international concern. Since the outbreak was first detected in December 2019 in Wuhan, China, it is estimated that the virus has infected 765 million people and killed nearly 7 million of them. More than 13.3 billion doses of various COVID-19 vaccines have been administered, covering 89 percent of health workers and 82 percent of adults over 60 years of age.

This is old news in the United States. The national COVID-19 emergency was officially terminated by a joint resolution of Congress and signed by President Joe Biden on April 10. Since the first domestic case of COVID-19 was diagnosed in Snohomish County, Washington, on January 20, 2020, nearly 105 million Americans have been diagnosed with the disease, of whom over 1,131,800 have died.

Physician and American Council on Science Health fellow Henry I. Miller argues that COVID-19 remains much worse than regular influenza. He points out that COVID-19 killed 350,000 Americans in 2020, whereas only 25,000 died of influenza during the 2019–2020 flu season. So far this year, about 43,000 Americans have died of COVID-19 and weekly deaths from COVID-19 have fallen from 4,109 in early January to 1,109 last week. COVID-19 dropped to the fourth-leading cause of death in the U.S. last year.

Nevertheless, the fact is that the pandemic was ef