The Covid will soon be no more dangerous than the seasonal flu

Covid-19 will soon be comparable to the threat of seasonal flu, said the World Health Organization on Friday, which hopes to lower its maximum alert level again this year. “I think we’re getting to the point where we can look at Covid-19 the same way we look at seasonal flu, which is a health threat, a virus that will continue to kill, but a virus that doesn’t disrupt our society or our hospital systems,” WHO emergency programs chief Michael Ryan told a news conference.

Lower the alert level in 2023?

Alongside him, the Director General of the WHO, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said he was “very pleased to note that, for the first time, the weekly number of deaths reported over the past four weeks has been lower than the one recorded when we first used the word ‘pandemic’ three years ago.” “We are certainly in a much better position today than at any time during the pandemic,” he observed. He was thus “confident” that the WHO could lower its maximum alert level “this year”.

The WHO had declared this “public health emergency of international concern” on January 30, 2020 – when the world had fewer than 100 cases and no deaths outside of China – but it was not until Dr Tedros called the pandemic situation, in March 2020, that the world had taken full measure of the seriousness of the health threat. “We had declared a global health emergency to urge countries to take decisive action, but not all did,” he said on Friday.

“Three years later, almost seven million deaths from Covid-19 have been reported, although we know that the number of deaths from Covid-19 is higher,” he said.