WHO's chief wants the pandemic declared over in 2023. Some experts say that may not be a good thing.

GENEVA (AN) – Everyone wants to put the pandemic in the rearview mirror, perhaps none more so than the head of the World Health Organization, which first declared COVID-19 had become a global health emergency nearly three years ago.

"We need to move beyond this emergency situation sometime by the end of the year," WHO's Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told Arete News.

WHO's Emergency Committee is scheduled to meet on Friday to consider whether to declare the emergency is over. The meeting will mark three years since COVID-19 was first declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern, or PHEIC, the highest level of alert that the U.N. health agency can issue.

Soon afterward, WHO issued a declaration on March 11, 2020, that the virus had become a pandemic – the global spread of a new disease.

The committee's role is to advise Tedros, who makes the final call. After three years of COVID-19, he said, nations would be better off if they could manage it like other respiratory viruses such as influenza and respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV.

"I’m confident that 2023 can be the year we move beyond this," Tedros said in a brief interview. "It’s something that will probably always be with us, but we can learn to live with it."

Many people in rich nations where vaccines, diagnostics and treatments are readily available have been clamoring to put the pandemic's restrictions behind them.

But even after a remarkable global push to develop and roll out COVID-19 vaccines, only about one-in-five people are getting vaccinated among the world's poorest nations, where diagnostics and treatments also are in short supply.

And some leading scientists say it may be too early to declare the end of the pandemic's emergency phase, mainly due to China's high level of infections.

170,000 reported deaths in 8 weeks

At last year's World Health Assembly, Tedros noted that 60% of the world’s population was vaccinated, which has helped to reduce hospitalizations and deaths and allowed health systems to cope and societies to reopen.

"But it’s not over anywhere until it’s over everywhere," he told the 194-nation assembly. "The pandemic will not magically disappear. But we can end it. We have the knowledge. We have the tools. Science has given us the upper hand."

Ending the pandemic also carries risks as long as a significant portion of the population is still dying from it or becoming seriously ill.

On Tuesday, Tedros told a media briefing that since the beginning of December, the number of weekly reported deaths from COVID-19 has been increasing.

"In the past eight weeks, more than 170,000 people have died of COVID-19. That’s just reported deaths; the actual number of deaths is much higher," he said.

Tedros said he wouldn't preempt the advice of the Emergency Committee, but he remains "very concerned" by the situation in many countries and the rising number of deaths.

"While we are clearly in better shape than three years ago when this pandemic first hit, the global collective response is once again under strain," he said, cautioning that too few people are adequately vaccinated or boosted, or receiving proper care.

"And there is a torrent of pseudo-science and misinformation circulating, which is undermining trust in safe and effective tools for COVID-19," he added.

"My message is clear – do not underestimate this virus, it has and will continue to surprise us and it will continue to kill, unless we do more to get health tools to people that need them and to comprehensively tackle misinformation."

Keeping the pressure on

Despite the temptation to end the pandemic, some leading health experts say it would be better to continue living with the official designation, which keeps up the pressure on authorities and civilians alike to act with caution.

They point to last winter’s Omicron variant, which spread quickly around the world displacing other variants and causing huge numbers of infections. Without the official pandemic designation, nations would lack emergency authorizations for regulators to speed the delivery of vaccines, treatments and care.

Last year, a U.S. report by 53 scholars and experts, including six of U.S. President Biden’s 16-member COVID-19 Advisory Board and leading infectious disease researchers, acknowledged that eliminating the virus was not a realistic goal.

It cautioned against ending the official pandemic too soon, at least not before constructing a "new normal" in which dealing with endemic COVID-19 does not require emergency measures and massive societal disruptions. The report received support from the Colton Foundation, Covid Collaborative, and The Rockefeller Foundation’s Pandemic Prevention Institute.

One of the report's contributors, Rick Bright, a prominent immunologist and former CEO of the Pandemic Prevention Institute, said "we have to build this level of protection and security against this pathogen" before the pandemic is declared over.

"I'm a fan of keeping that pressure on, keeping that momentum. We haven't accomplished all those things that need to be done to end it when we want to end it," he told Arete News. "The virus has continued to evolve because we haven't controlled it adequately."

Bright, a former deputy assistant secretary for preparedness and response and director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, questioned the argument for learning to live with COVID-19 when so many people are still dying from the virus and its variants.

"Ninety percent of the population perhaps might be able to live with it. But we still have a 10% population, which is a large number, that are dying every day still from this," he said. "Are we willing to accept in the United States 500 people dying every day to say we're going to live with this? Or do we want to keep the pressure on?"

China, for instance, says it had 60,000 deaths between Dec. 8 and Jan. 12 since loosening three years of restrictions, but the official figures are widely seen as underreporting the outbreak.

Ending WHO's declaration of a public health emergency would encourage a public health mindset where "no longer do we have access to the drugs and vaccines, no longer are they affordable, no longer do we have programs making sure people are getting tested or are treated appropriately or timely in those ways," Bright said.

"You have a novel pathogen that is causing significant morbidity or sickness and death in a population, and it's spreading globally. So as long as you have this virus out of control and vulnerable populations, and the virus is still able to kill so many people, or hospitalize so many people, and trigger so many other long-term health care conditions we don't even understand yet, then you still have a pandemic," he said. "No matter if you want to formalize what you call it or not, it's a pandemic and should be treated with the urgency to try to bring it under control and end it."