Tannuka Juneja
Although deaths from the coronavirus have fallen to their lowest level since the start of the pandemic, Covid-19 remains a global public health emergency, the World Health Organization (WHO) said.
“The drop in the number of deaths from the new coronavirus is good news, but some countries are still seeing significant spikes in cases, putting pressure on hospitals,” said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. Under these conditions, the WHO Emergency Committee agreed “unanimously” this week that Covid-19 still remains a public health emergency.
The UN’s world health agency first declared Covid-19 a global health emergency on January 30, 2020, just over a month after the virus emerged in Wuhan, China.
According to the latest weekly report on the epidemiological situation published on Tuesday, April 12 by the WHO, the number of Covid-19 cases continued to fall for the third consecutive week with a decline of 24% during the week of April 4 to 10 compared to the previous week. Meanwhile, the world has recorded more than 22,000 deaths, the lowest level since March 30, 2020, according to WHO data.
With the new health data, committee chairman Dr Didier Houssin said the committee is working on criteria, including epidemiological data and the level of international assistance to contain the virus, to determine when the WHO can declare the health emergency over, “It is always easier to declare a pandemic than not to declare one,” he concluded.
India has reported 975 fresh Covid cases, 796 recoveries and 4 deaths in the last 24 hours, the Union health ministry said on Saturday. The active caseload in India currently stands at 11,366, the government said.
Worldwide, according to the count kept by the WHO, on April 13, 2022, there were 6,185,242 deaths for more than 499 million confirmed cases. As of April 5, 2022, a total of more than 11.2 billion doses of vaccine have been administered worldwide.
