COVID-19 is no longer a global health emergency, the World Health Organisation has said.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus made the announcement this afternoon, more than three years after the body first declared the emergency.
“It's with great hope that I declare COVID-19 over as a global health emergency,” he said.
“That does not mean COVID-19 is over as a global health threat.”
There have been more than six million COVID-related deaths recorded around the world since the WHO declared it a pandemic on March 11th, 2020.
Noting that COVID had “changed our world and it changed us”, the WHO chief said the risk of new variants remains.
He said the pandemic had been on a downward trend for more than a year, acknowledging that most countries have already returned to life before COVID.
The WHO made the decision to lower its highest level of alert after convening an expert group on Thursday.
The UN agency doesn't technically "declare" pandemics, but first used the term to describe the outbreak in March 2020, long after many other scientists had said a pandemic was already under way.
Around 764 million COVID cases have been recorded globally and about five billion people have received at least one dose of vaccine.
