In 2024, 50 times fewer people will die from the disease worldwide compared to 2021. It has reached a severity similar to the flu, but WHO remains alert.
Five years after the first cases of Covid-19, which led to the worst pandemic in a century, the disease is no longer seen as a threat, but continues to kill and keep institutions such as the World Health Organization (WHO) on alert.
In 2024, the UN agency was notified of three million cases worldwide, a far cry from the 445 million registered in 2022, the year with the most reported cases, according to data released by EFE.
In 2024, around 70,000 people died, 50 times less than the 3.52 million deaths recorded in 2021, the deadliest year, according to official figures.
The SARS-CoV-2 virus has transformed, thanks to vaccines and its evolution into more contagious but less lethal variants, into a pathogen comparable to the flu: an illness that in most cases causes mild symptoms or moderate, although it can still be dangerous for the elderly and other vulnerable groups.
“We no longer hear about Covid, but the virus continues to circulate widely around the world. There is not much visibility because There are not so many tests anymore, surveillance has been reduced,” according to WHO expert Maria Van Kerkhove, who has led the agency’s response to the disease since 2020.
The WHO estimates, through tests in residential water in different countries, that the actual circulation of the virus could be up to 20 times greater than officially estimated. And she’s worried about the persistence of the call “Long Covid”, which, according to its estimates, affects six percent of serious cases after recovery.
“It affects multiple organs, from the heart to the lungs, to the brain or can even have consequences for mental health”, highlighted the North American specialist in a recent conversation at the WHO to analyze five years of the disease.
The first cases of what would come to be known as Covid-19 were identified in December 2019, in the city of Wuhanin central China, and were reported to the WHO on the 31st of that month.
On January 5, 2020, the agency issued its first alert for what it then called “pneumonia of unknown origin detected in China”. On January 30, an international alert was declared for the disease, on February 11 it was named “Covid-19” and, on March 11, it was officially declared a pandemic.
“I remember the first press conference I gave on the subject, on January 14, and I thought I would never participate in another one,” he recalls. Van Kerkhove, who gave hundreds of lectures on the topic over three years, alongside the WHO emergency chief, Mike Ryan.
The WHO continues to recommend that people over 65 and other vulnerable groups are vaccinated regularly to prevent severe forms of the disease that lead to hospitalization: currently, the vaccine is mainly based on the JN.1 subvariant, the most widespread currently and a ‘descendant’ of the omicron variant.
The WHO asks, whenever it has the opportunity, that no one forget a virus that affected almost the entire population of the planet.
Above all, the WHO intends for memory to be the driving force of a treaty against pandemicsin negotiation for almost three years. The objective is to prepare all countries for future agents with pandemic potential, be they new Coronavirus, the dreaded bird flu (very lethal, but not transmissible between humans) or another unknown agent, nicknamed “disease X”.
This year, the WHO was unable to get the treaty signed at its June assembly, then negotiations continue, hampered mainly by the lack of consensus between countries on issues such as the commercialization and distribution of vaccines, treatments and diagnostic tests in the event of a pandemic.
“People want to throw Covid into the past, pretend it never happened because it was traumatic, but this prevents us from preparing for the future”, warns Van Kerkhove.
Official WHO figures indicate that since the end of 2019 there have been 777 million cases and seven million deaths from Covid-19, although the UN agency itself recognizes that the number of deaths could be up to three times higher and exceed 20 million.
Since March 1, 2020, when the first cases were reported, Portugal has recorded more than 5.6 million cases of infection by the SARS-CoV-2 virus and more than 26 thousand deaths associated with Covid-19.
