BELIZE CITY, Sun. Mar. 13, 2022– Belize and many other countries have been slowly rolling back COVID-19 regulations in light of what currently appears to be a deceasing number of Covid-19 cases following the decline of the recent Omicron wave of the virus. The World Health Organization’s (WHO) International Health Regulation Emergency Committee on COVID-19 is currently discussing the next steps forward to determine what conditions should signal an end to the public health emergency first declared in January 2020.

The committee, based in Geneva, Switzerland, is made up of public health experts who are currently in discussion on how and when the world can call an end to the pandemic, but it has made it clear that such a declaration is not yet being considered, despite the ever-lower number of cases worldwide.

Any new recommended steps emerging from those discussions would signify a meaningful move toward ending the pandemic and would trigger a rollback of more public health regulations that had been put in place to minimize the impact of the virus.

The pandemic, however, is still very much ongoing, with 10 million cases being reported in the last week, and 52,000 fatalities also recently recorded. Some Asian countries are seeing a surge of infections, with a spike of deaths being recorded in Hong Kong, and 1,000 plus cases being recorded in China last week, for the first time in two years.

Experts say the disease is likely to continue to cause deaths in the thousands each year, even if cases reach lower levels – and the potential for new and dangerous variants is an unpredictable reality.

The level of population immunity—the percentage of a population that has antibodies to fight the disease, either as a result of infection or vaccination, or both—will be a key metric in the decision to lift the global emergency declaration. Ultimately, the decision will be made by WHO’s Director-General, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus after he consults with the experts on the committee.

The goal of herd immunity, seen as the saving grace at the start of the pandemic, is now being viewed as “extremely unlikely,” since vaccinations for the virus do not in all cases prevent infection, and infection does not prevent repeated bouts of the virus, according to David Heymann, in an interview with Bloomberg News.

Heymann, a former epidemiologist for WHO and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, says many countries are now relying on national and regional data to guide their decision making, but are not ignoring the WHO.