The end of the covid emergency is a warning

The End of the Covid Global Emergency: What Have We Learned and What Can We Don’t Learn About New Diseases, Diseases and Diseases?

The emergency stage of Covid-19 is over in official terms. The World Health Organization declared an end to the Covid global health emergency last week, and the US will end its federal public health emergency for Covid on Thursday. After a full year, the European Union decided to end its emergency declaration.

The announcement didn’t come as a surprise. After the emergency committee’s last meeting, in late January, Tedros acknowledged that the pandemic was probably at a transition point.

“This is not a snap decision. It is a decision that has been considered carefully for some time, planned for, and made on the basis of a careful analysis of the data,” he said during the press conference.

Although he says the decision was pragmatic and reasonable, he worries about the effects on resources and the availability of diagnostic tests, vaccinations and treatments.

Epidemiologist Jennifer Nuzzo, the director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University, in Providence, Rhode Island, says it is unclear whether this decision will have much of an impact, given that many countries have already been relaxing measures to combat COVID-19. The decision to ban smoking in public places was made long before the political attention to the swine flu was lost. “Even while COVID remains a top cause of death, governments have decided to put their energies elsewhere.”

As global and national officials roll back the widespread data tracking, cross-government coordination, and testing programs that were quintessential to the emergency phase of the pandemic, the move raises questions about what was learned from this three-year fight, as well as the vulnerabilities that could be exposed if a new, severe Covid variant—or an entirely new pathogen—emerges.

New cases in the US have all fallen according to data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That is true of deaths and cases in the EU. But when the US ends its emergency on May 11, the CDC will stop tracking community levels of transmission and instead will track overall hospitalization and death rates. The emergency declaration mandated that local data be provided, and that will now lapse.

The shift will also make it more challenging for public health officials to convey how serious a risk a future variant could be. “The messaging around ‘it’s over, we’ve won’ is setting us up for a huge betrayal of trust if there is another variant that shows up,” says Sam Scarpino, a professor of health sciences and computer science at Northeastern University. It will be difficult to get a lot of people to buy in on taking updated vaccines or returning to social isolation without that trust. In the US, only 17 percent of people received last year’s booster shot, and only 14 percent did so in the EU.