Equipo Nizkor - As global COVID emergency ends, in Israel, grim milestone underlines lurking threat.

Israel confirmed the death of its 12,500th victim of the coronavirus this week, as the World Health Organization declared an end on Friday to the global health emergency sparked by the deadly, world-altering pathogen.

Israel was among the first countries outside East Asia to slap strict travel and quarantine restrictions in late February and early March 2020, after the then-nascent virus started spreading across the world following its first detection in China in late 2019.

In 10 days, Israel will lift one of the last of its few remaining health restrictions: ending mandatory home isolation for those carrying COVID-19.

s in much of the rest of the world, the pandemic has largely faded from public life, with masks and crowd limits giving way to pre-coronavirus norms. But it has continued to lurk in the background, even as health experts say high immunization levels, both from vaccination and previous infection, have helped dramatically reduce disease spread and severity.

According to the Health Ministry's Coronavirus dashboard Friday, 225 coronavirus cases were reported in Israel Thursday, bringing the number of currently active cases nationwide to 3,083.

Over 200 people are hospitalized with the disease, including nearly two dozen who are hooked up to respirators, as of Friday.

Over 4.8 million cases have been recorded in Israel since the pandemic's start.

On Monday, the Health Ministry reported the 12,499th and 12,500th deaths in Israel since March 21, 2020, when COVID-19 claimed its first victim, 88-year-old Holocaust survivor Aryeh Even.

At the height of the pandemic, Israel imposed severe restrictions to halt infections, including barring most international travel, shuttering schools, closing non-essential businesses, limiting indoor gatherings, and requiring masks in public spaces.

But those restrictions have gradually rolled back over the past two years. The country officially lifted the indoor mask mandate in April 2022, scrapping one of the few remaining restrictions that were still in place more than two years into the pandemic.

In February, authorities canceled a rule requiring masks in medical facilities and retirement homes, and the requirement for visitors to present a negative COVID test at retirement homes. They also announced that obligatory home isolation quarantine for those diagnosed with the virus would end on May 15.

No longer a global emergency

On Friday, the WHO declared that COVID-19 no longer qualifies as a global emergency, marking a symbolic end to a pandemic that triggered once-unthinkable lockdowns, upended economies, and killed millions of people worldwide.

The move came after the WHO's independent emergency committee on the COVID-19 crisis agreed it no longer merited the organization's highest alert level and "advised that it is time to transition to long-term management of the COVID-19 pandemic."

The announcement was made more than three years after the organization declared the coronavirus an international crisis, offers some relief -- if not an ending -- to a pandemic that stirred fear and suspicion, hand-wringing and finger-pointing across the globe.

The UN health agency's officials said that even though the emergency phase was over, the pandemic is not over, noting recent spikes in cases in Southeast Asia and the Middle East.

WHO says thousands of people are still dying from the virus every week, and millions of others are suffering from debilitating, long-term effects.

"It's with great hope that I declare COVID-19 over as a global health emergency," WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said

"That does not mean COVID-19 is over as a global health threat," he said, warning that new variants could yet emerge. Tedros noted that while the official COVID-19 death toll was 7 million, the real figure was estimated to be at least 20 million.

Tedros 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-19.

He bemoaned the damage that COVID-19 had done to the global community, saying the pandemic had shattered businesses, exacerbated political divisions, led to the spread of misinformation and plunged millions into poverty.

The political fallout in some countries was swift and unforgiving. Some pundits say missteps by former president Donald Trump in his administration's response to the pandemic had a role in his losing reelection bid in 2020.

The United States saw the deadliest outbreak anywhere in the world -- where more than 1 million people died across the country.

Dr. Michael Ryan, WHO's emergencies chief, said it was incumbent on heads of states and other leaders to negotiate a wide-ranging pandemic treaty to decide how future health threats should be faced.

Ryan said that some of the scenes witnessed during COVID-19, when people resorted to "bartering for oxygen canisters," fought to get into emergency rooms and died in parking lots because they couldn't get treated, must never be repeated.

A great tragedy

The UN health agency first declared the so-called public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC) over the crisis on January 30, 2020.

That was weeks after the mysterious new viral disease was first detected in China and when fewer than 100 cases and no deaths had been reported outside that country.

But it was only after Tedros described the worsening COVID situation as a pandemic on March 11, 2020, that many countries woke up to the danger.

By then, the SARS-CoV-2 virus which causes the disease had already begun its deadly rampage around the globe

"One of the greatest tragedies of COVID-19 is that it didn't have to be this way," Tedros said, decrying that "a lack of coordination, a lack of equity and a lack of solidarity" meant "lives were lost that should not have been".

"We must promise ourselves and our children and grandchildren that we will never make those mistakes again."

Even though COVID deaths globally have plunged 95 percent since January, the disease remains a major killer.

Last week alone "COVID-19 claimed a life every three minutes", Tedros said, "and that's just the deaths we know about."

"The emergency phase is over, but COVID is not," agreed Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO's technical lead on COVID-19.

We can't forget

Vaccines, which were developed at record speed and started rolling out by late 2020, remain effective at preventing severe disease and death, despite new and more infectious COVID variants that have appeared.

To date, 13.3 billion doses of COVID vaccines have been administered, with 82 percent of adults over 60 having received the initial jabs.

However, greed and gaping inequities surfaced, as wealthy countries hoarded the jabs and poorer ones struggled for months to get hold of a single dose.

An antivax movement on steroids and massive misinformation campaigns over social media meanwhile turned vaccination into a charged political issue.

The pandemic also exposed staggering inequality in access to healthcare and services, from the long lines of Brazilians waiting for oxygen for loved ones gasping for air, to the funeral pyres that crammed New Delhi's sidewalks as the bodies piled up in early 2021.

"We can't forget those fire pyres, we can't forget the graves that were dug," Van Kerkhove said, her voice catching with emotion. "I won't forget them."

06May23

As global COVID emergency ends, in Israel, grim milestone underlines lurking threat

[Source: The Times of Israel, TOI Staff and Agencies, Tel Aviv, 06May23]

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