WHO said that even though the emergency phase was over, the pandemic hasn’t come to an end, noting recent spikes in cases in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. The United Nations health agency says that thousands of people are still dying from the virus every week.

“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, adding he wouldn’t hesitate to reconvene experts to reassess the situation should COVID-19 “put our world in peril.”

[Are these actual deaths *from* COVID, or correlated to an exposure to COVDID? Neither WHO nor the CDC distinguish between the two, despite three years of criticism over that particular issue in data collection. — Ed]