Mystery over coronavirus spread remains

The World Health Organisation (WHO) had on Friday declared that the global health emergency in the wake of the outbreak of Covid-19 is at an end. It comes more than three years after the world organisation had declared the emergency on January 30, 2020. It is now acknowledged that 20 million people have died of Covid-19, 764 million have been infected, and 5 billion have been vaccinated. WHO said that the earlier death toll of 7 million was wrong. WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said, “Yesterday, the Emergency Committee had met for the 15th time and recommended to me that I declare an end to the public health emergency of international concern. I’ve accepted that advice. It’s, therefore, with great hope that I declare Covid-19 over as a global health emergency.”

But there were caveats. The emergency is over but the danger posed by Covid-19 remains. WHO says that thousands of people are still dying from coronavirus every week around the world. Is it a confusing message from the WHO? Not really. It means that coronavirus is prevalent and medical emergency measures have to be taken to tackle it, but the infection is not spreading as fast and as fatally as it did in 2020 and 2021. The coronavirus was mutating and evolving into fatal new mutations for which there seemed to be no cure. The coronavirus vaccine that had emerged from various countries like China, Russia, the United States, Great Britain, and India and by various pharma companies like Astra-Zeneca in England, Pfizer in Germany and the United States, Moderna in the United States, Astra-Zeneca in England, Sinopac in China had helped in countering the virus in 2021 and 2022. In countries like India, two billion plus vaccines doses were administered in government and private hospitals.

But complaints remained. The vaccine was confined mostly to developed and emerging market economies that it did not reach the poor countries in Africa and in Latin America, and the poor people had no access to the vaccines. The governments, the pharma companies were guilty and not guilty. They were able to bring the vaccines out at an amazing speed, but the delivery was not as effective as anyone would have desired. The logistics were indeed nightmarish, and inter-governmental cooperation did not live up to the expectations. There are sure lessons to be learned on this front, but it is true that the realisation comes too late and after the death of millions of people.

It is now an acknowledged fact that Covid-19 had wrecked national economies, thrown people out of jobs and forced the governments which had the means to do so to give financial and material aid to the people. But those government were caught in the deficit trap and rising inflation. And governments were forced to raise taxes and central banks had to resort to interest rate hikes. The global economy is struggling to get back to the pre-Covid-19 levels of growth.

And the mystery of how and why the coronavirus had spread so fast and in such a fatal fashion remains. Politics came into play, with Western countries blaming China because the coronavirus broke out first in Wuhan. The complaint was that China did not report the issue quickly enough and that the WHO dragged its feet till the end of January, 2020 to declare the global health emergency.

The next bit of controversy surrounding Covid-19 was whether the virus spread from animal to human beings in Wuhan’s market, or whether it leaked from a laboratory. The WHO team went to China to probe the issue but it could not come up with any clear answers.