COVID-19 variant tracking and vaccinations would continue, as the disease is still spreading in Taiwan, even though the WHO declared that it was no longer a public health emergency of international concern, local health officials said yesterday.
After the WHO’s International Health Regulations Emergency Committee met on Thursday, it recommended that the global health body declare an end to the public health emergency of international concern, which it accepted, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a news conference on Friday.
“It is therefore with great hope that I declare COVID-19 over as a global health emergency,” Tedros said. “However, that does not mean COVID-19 is over as a global health threat.”
Photo: Reuters
Deputy Minister of Health and Welfare Victor Wang (王必勝) — who headed the Central Epidemic Command Center before it was disbanded on Monday — agreed, saying that “the virus has not disappeared and remains in our communities.”
“Vulnerable groups” — including elderly people, those with underlying health conditions and those who are unvaccinated — should get at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine per year, and people who have contracted the disease who are eligible for oral anti-viral drugs should see a doctor for a prescription, he wrote on Facebook.
Centers for Disease Control Deputy Director-General Philip Lo (羅一鈞) said the US government ended its national and public health emergency declarations and the Japanese government plans to downgrade COVID-19 and end border measures this month.
However, the WHO’s declaration only means that COVID-19 prevention should be normalized and does not mean that infections would end, so variant tracking and vaccinations would continue.
Tedros said the disease is here to stay and was still changing, as “thousands of people around the world are fighting for their lives in intensive care units, and millions more continue to live with the debilitating effects of post-COVID-19 condition.”
“Last week, COVID-19 claimed a life every three minutes — and that’s just the deaths we know about,” he said.
Since the WHO learned about clustered cases of pneumonia of unknown cause in Wuhan, China, 1,221 days ago, almost 7 million deaths have been reported, but the organization believes that toll is at least 20 million, he said.
For more than a year, the disease has been on a downward trend, allowing most countries to return to life as it was before the COVID-19 pandemic, he said.
“It is time for countries to transition from emergency mode to managing COVID-19 alongside other infectious diseases,” he said.
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