I saw the headline on CBS News.
WHO says COVID emergency is over. So what does that mean?
So, of course, I assumed they were going to tell us, who says the emergency is over? But they actually meant, “WHO” says the emergency is over. As in “World Health Organization”.
There’s actually a particular WHO committee, telling us that the emergency is over. (For the time being, at least.) That’s the ‘IHR Emergency Committee for COVID-19’, and they held their first meeting on January 22, 2020, and proceeded to declare a Public Health Emergency of International Concern.
That may have been a big mistake.
Following this declaration, 7 million people died of COVID. About 6,400 people a day, on average. Now, I’m not going to claim that the Public Health Emergency declaration caused all those people to die, but did it really help? I know that it caused a lot of anxiety.
Globally, 58 million people died in 2019, before the arrival of COVID, and we hardly even noticed. That’s like, 159,000 every day.
Did we all go around wearing masks, and acting afraid of each other, in 2019? Not that I recall.
So who are these WHO people, who caused us to spend three years going to ZOOM meetings and drinking alone?
I think we have a right to know. So here they are, in alphabetical order:
- Dr Martin Cetron, U.S. Centers for Disease Control
- Dr Supamit Chunsuttiwat, Ministry of Public Health, Thailand
- Dr Vladimir Dubyanskiy, Stavropol Plague Control Research Institute, Russia
- Dr Didier Houssin, AP-HP International, France
- Dr Youngmee Jee, Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency
- Dr Nyoman Kandun, Ministry of Health, Indonesia
- Dr Hiroshi Kida, Hokkaido University, Japan
- Professor Marion Koopmans, Erasmus Medical Centre, Netherlands
- Rose Leke, University of Yaoundé, Cameroon
- Professor Wannian Liang, Tsinghua University, People’s Republic of China
- Professor John S. Mackenzie, Curtin University, Australia
- Dr Brian McCloskey, Chatham House Centre on Global Health Security, UK
- Ziad Memish, Ministry of Health, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
- Adelle Chang On, Ministry of Health, Trinidad and Tobago
- Dr Palliri Ravindran, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, India
- Professor Helen Rees, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa
- Dr Muhammad Salman, National Institute of Health, Pakistan
- Dr Denise Werker, University of Saskatchewan, Canada
The guy who actually made the public announcements about the ’emergency’ was WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
WHO?
If I were picking someone to be my Director-General, I would pick someone with a pronounceable name. But I suppose, if you’ve spent your life studying medical conditions with names like ‘Onchocerciasis’ and ‘Sphenopalatine Ganglioneuralgia’ and ‘Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis’… then ‘Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus’ might seem like a piece of cake.
Apparently, his friends call him ‘Tedros’.
At any rate, Director-General Tedros announced last week that the IHR Emergency Committee for COVID-19 had discussed the apparent fact that the pandemic has been “on a downward trend for more than a year, with population immunity increasing from vaccination and infection,” and is recommending most countries “to return to life as we knew it before COVID-19.”
Or, as the case may be, to return to death as we knew it before COVID-19.
From the CBS news report about the end of the emergency:
WHAT ARE THE PRACTICAL EFFECTS?
For the average person, nothing… Many countries, including Britain, France, Germany and the U.S., have long dropped many of their pandemic-era restrictions.
IS COVID-19 STILL A PANDEMIC?
Yes. Although WHO chief Tedros said the coronavirus emergency was over, he warned that the virus is here to stay and that thousands of people continue to die every week…
For the month of April, there were nearly 3 million cases reported, and more than 17,000 deaths reported. So, a damn sight better than the past three years, when 6,400 were dying every day.
Not to be outdone by a group of mostly foreigners, President Joe Biden signed legislation last month, declaring that the emergency would end here in the U.S. on May 11, and a flood of immigrants — who’ve been waiting, mostly patiently — could come across the border. But in doing so, Biden gave his hand away, and Director-General Tedros got his group to declare the emergency over on May 5.
So immature, this whole competition.
For a few moments, some of us foolishly thought the emergency would finally convince our national leaders to institute universal health care in America, like they have in every civilized country. No such luck.
WHO emergencies chief Dr. Michael Ryan said the coronavirus is still a public health threat.
“Pandemics only truly end when the next pandemic begins,” he said.
I can hardly wait.
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all.