COVID-19 could become ‘just like flu’ says World Health Organization chief

The World Well being Group says the COVID-19 pandemic may cool down this yr to a degree the place it poses a risk just like flu.The UN well being company earlier voiced confidence that it is going to be capable of declare an finish to the emergency someday in 2023, saying it was more and more hopeful in regards to the pandemic section of the virus coming to a detailed.Final weekend marked three years because the WHO first described the scenario as a ‘pandemic’ though the organisation’s chief, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, insists nations ought to have acted a number of weeks beforehand.”I feel we’re coming to that time the place we will take a look at Covid-19 in the identical method we take a look at seasonal influenza,” WHO emergencies director Michael Ryan advised a press convention.”A risk to well being, a virus that may proceed to kill. However a virus that isn’t disrupting our society or disrupting our hospital techniques, and I consider that that may come, as Tedros stated, this yr.”The WHO chief stated the world was in a significantly better place now than it has been at any time in the course of the pandemic.The WHO declared a PHEIC, the very best stage of alarm it might sound, on January 30, 2020, when, exterior of China, fewer than 100 instances and no deaths had been reported.However it was solely when Tedros described the worsening scenario as a pandemic on 11 March that yr that many nations appeared to get up to the hazard.”We declared a worldwide well being emergency to spur nations to take decisive motion, however not all nations did,” he stated on Friday.”Three years later, there are virtually seven million reported deaths from COVID-19, though we all know that the precise variety of deaths is way greater.”He was happy that for the primary time, the weekly variety of reported deaths over the previous 4 weeks has been decrease than when he first described COVID-19 as a pandemic.However he stated greater than 5,000 deaths reported per week was 5,000 too many for a illness that may be prevented and handled.