COVID-19 still claims 1,700 lives every week globally: WHO

NEW DELHI: Covid-19 is still killing around 1,700 people a week globally, the World Health Organization said.

The world health body urged at-risk populations to keep up with their vaccinations against the disease.

“Even as we continue to study the spread of H5N1, we also continue to study COVID-19, which still kills an average of 1700 people globally every week,” WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said.

“However, data show that vaccine coverage has declined among health workers and people over 60, two of the most at-risk groups.”

“WHO recommends that people in the highest-risk groups receive a COVID-19 vaccine within 12 months of their last dose,” he said at a press conference.

WHO declared an end to COVID-19, which wreaked global havoc, as an international public health emergency in May 2023, more than three years after the virus was first detected in Wuhan, China, in late 2019.

The WHO has urged governments to maintain virus surveillance and sequencing and to ensure access to affordable and reliable tests, treatments and vaccines.

In its report in May, WHO said that the pandemic wiped out nearly a decade of progress in improving life expectancy within just two years.

Between 2019 and 2021, global life expectancy dropped by 1.8 years to 71.4 years (back to the level of 2012). Similarly, global healthy life expectancy dropped by 1.5 years to 61.9 years in 2021 (back to the level of 2012).

It said the COVID-19 pandemic reversed the trend of steady gain in life expectancy at birth and healthy life expectancy at birth.

It added that COVID-19 rapidly emerged as a leading cause of death, ranking as the third highest cause of mortality globally in 2020 and the second in 2021. Nearly 13 million lives were lost during this period.