Covid is no longer a global health emergency, WHO says But the virus will remain a serious problem for years to come and we should not become complacent 🔴 BawdenTom reports
, professor of genetic epidemiology at King’s College who runs the ZOE health care app which monitors Covid-19 levels in the UK, told“It’s reasonable to say it’s over but we should still keep monitoring it and there will still be millions of people getting infected. But it’s no longer a pandemic that should be top of our list of priorities.Professor Steve Griffin, virologist
“I agree with the decision as long as the WHO urges people to still keep aware of what’s going on and testing for new variants,” he added. The latest figures from WHO show that there were just over 3,568 Covid deaths around the world in the last week of April, down from a peak of more than 100,000 in January 2021.
Professor Hunter acknowledged that Covid was “gradually causing less and less severe disease”, but added: “The infection is still very common and will likely remain so. I expect the rate of infection will settle down to about 80,000 to 100,000 infections a day on average at least for the next few years in England – more in the winter and less in the summer – which is about where we are now.
“But we are seeing the impact on severe disease getting less and less. Probably the least biased indicator now is “people in hospital primarily because of Covid’ and that has been showing increasingly dampened waves since the first wave ofProfessor Lawrence Young, a virologist at Warwick University, said the outlook was still far from clear, even more than three years into the virus.
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