WHO To Decide If COVID-19 Is Still A Global Gealth Emergency
High-ranking members of the World Health Organization (WHO) are meeting Friday to decide whether it’s time to end the emergency phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, three years after it was first declared.
In all likelihood, it will continue as the virus continues mutating, spreading, and infecting across the world.
Wednesday marked the third anniversary of the first confirmed COVID-19 case in Toronto – a man in his 50s who had recently travelled to Wuhan, China. In Ontario, there have been more than 1.57 million cases of COVID-19 to date, however, that number is considered underreported due to restrictions on who can get a PCR test.
As for today’s meeting, there are several leading scientists and WHO advisors who feel it may be too early to declare the end of this pandemic’s emergency phase.
Speaking last week, Canada’s Chief Public Health Officer, Dr. Theresa Tam, says regardless of what it decides — this country will stay on its present course.
“Whatever the decision is made, we just need to keep going with what we’re doing now. We mustn’t let go of the gains that we’ve had in the last several years, including surveillance systems, anti-viral developments and we mustn’t reduce the research investments.”
She stresses not much, if anything, will change in Canada whichever way the WHO goes.
“In the upcoming year, we need to continue to monitor the evolution of the virus — the Omicron variant because it’s still spreading quite a bit all over the world. It’s going to undergo its mutations. I think we are seeing that in real time [and] monitoring that is very important because it’s likely to increase its immune evasion properties and we may have to adjust things like vaccine formulations.”
