Geneva, Jan. 13 (BNA): The World Health Organization (WHO) will consider whether to extend the global public health emergency on Thursday with the help of an independent panel of experts.
The German news agency (dpa) reported that a “public health emergency of international concern” has been in place for nearly two years now due to the coronavirus pandemic.
It is the highest alert level that the World Health Organization can impose.
The commission plans to make a recommendation by evening – and the WHO usually follows its advice.
Whether or not the committee recommends declaring a coronavirus emergency, there will be few practical consequences. However, many experts worry that ending it might send the wrong signal.
“This virus is on the way to becoming endemic but we are not there yet,” Maria Van Kerkhove, a coronavirus expert at the World Health Organization, said late Wednesday.
Within the European Union, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has already suggested that Covid-19 could soon be treated like the flu.
But Van Kerkhove opposed this idea. “We don’t have the same predictability as we have with influenza where we have a typical seasonal pattern,” she said.
The World Health Organization has been repeatedly accused of not declaring a state of emergency shortly after the first cases of Covid-19 appeared in China.
When the World Health Organization declared a global emergency on January 30, 2020, about 100 infections were known outside of China in 21 countries.
Since then, more than 308 million infections and nearly 5.5 million deaths have been reported worldwide.
MI