Editorial: Covid officially downgraded, but what about the next pandemic?

Knowing to use physical distancing in a virus outbreak is one of the health lessons to take forward. Photo / Dean Purcell

It has taken longer than hoped for, but the UN’s World Health Organisation has officially drawn a line under the Covid-19 pandemic.

With these words - “I declare Covid-19 over as a global health emergency” - WHO director-general Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus at the weekend put a symbolic full stop on the worst phase of this coronavirus threat.

The WHO’s emergency declaration on January 30, 2020, helped galvanise action over the health danger. It’s taken more than three years and the deaths of at least seven million people to get to this stage.

The lifting of the highest alert status does not mean that Covid is over, just that it is here to stay at a lower, less urgent level. The world has made progress in coping with it, especially with vaccines, and offshoots of the Omicron variant have been dominant for a year and a half.

WHO data shows the global Covid death rate has dropped from more than 100,000 people a week in early 2021 to about 3500 a week last month. In the last week of April, there were 11,063 new weekly cases in New Zealand and a further 26 deaths.

Most governments and people had already made a mental shift on Covid last year, judging that with widespread vaccine shots, treatments, boosters and population immunity from infection it no longer needs to be a foreground worry for most individuals in everyday life. Kiwis have been catching up with the world outside in large numbers.

But Tedros in his statement made it clear that we shouldn’t collectively forget useful aspects of what we’ve been through. “If we go back to how things were before Covid-19, we will have failed to learn our lessons, and failed our future generations.”

And emergencies director Dr Michael Ryan said: “We still have weaknesses and those weaknesses that we still have in our system will be exposed by this virus or another virus. And it needs to be fixed.”

Will there be better global co-ordination between countries over a new virus threat?

From a New Zealand government point of view, it means working on resilience for a future outbreak - including having enough medical supplies, quick access to vaccines, adequate data and testing systems to track spread, infrastructure improvements, ways of better helping the most vulnerable, and reassessing health requirements.

Individuals can try to avoid new or reinfections, get boosters if eligible. Should there be another outbreak, people can remember the value of ventilation for events, and the use of distance and isolation for protection. Masks for the general public are supermarket items now and a lot of households will have a box of them at home.

There’s still a review of New Zealand’s overall pandemic performance to come which could provide a manual for future governments - and what can be done to prepare for the next one.

In the past 20 years there have been four pandemics - Sars (2003), H1N1 (2009), Mers (2012) and Covid (2019). Another in the next two or three years would not surprise.

While New Zealand did well in comparison to the vast majority of other countries, there will be positive changes that can be made, based on lessons learned.