WHO to decide if COVID-19 is still a global health emergency

High-ranking members of the World Health Organization (WHO) are meeting Friday to decide whether it’s time to end the emergency phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, three years after it was first declared.

In all likelihood, it will continue as the virus continues mutating, spreading, and infecting across the world.

This meeting comes one day before B.C. marks three years since a case was first confirmed in the province. Since then, there have been nearly 395,000 confirmed cases of the virus and its variants and more than 5,000 deaths — not to mention the thousand more who’ve been hospitalized. The virus brought the, already fragile, healthcare system to its knees and it’s still struggling to recover.

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As for today’s meeting, there are several leading scientists and WHO advisors who feel it may be too early to declare the end of this pandemic’s emergency phase.

Speaking last week, Canada’s Chief Public Health Officer, Dr. Theresa Tam, says regardless of what it decides — this country will stay on its present course.

“Whatever the decision is made, we just need to keep going with what we’re doing now. We mustn’t let go of the gains that we’ve had in the last several years, including surveillance systems, anti-viral developments and we mustn’t reduce the research investments.”

She stresses not much, if anything, will change in Canada whichever way the WHO goes.

“In the upcoming year, we need to continue to monitor the evolution of the virus — the Omicron variant because it’s still spreading quite a bit all over the world. It’s going to undergo its mutations. I think we are seeing that in real time [and] monitoring that is very important because it’s likely to increase its immune evasion properties and we may have to adjust things like vaccine formulations.”

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Tam, like most experts, is pushing for everyone to update their vaccine status.

“If you haven’t had a full booster with a bivalent vaccine, go get it now. We still have a ways to go, even for the 65-plus population, about half of them haven’t received a full booster.”

The latest numbers from the BCCDC show just 32 per cent of this province’s population has all four doses of a COVID-19 vaccine.

Meantime, an independent group of COVID-19 modellers have released their latest report and find the Kraken variant is the fastest spreading, but it doesn’t look like it’s going to lead to a spike in infections.