The end of the COVID-19 emergency
The WHO declares the pandemic emergency over after three years and some twenty million excess deaths.
- When
- Known to
- ± 12 hours
- Era
- Contemporary, Holocene
On 5 May 2023 the WHO ended the public health emergency of international concern it had declared in January 2020. Reported deaths stood near seven million; excess-mortality estimates run to about twenty million. The virus did not go away — it became endemic and seasonal. The mRNA platform developed against it has since been turned on cancer and other diseases, the most consequential scientific legacy of the pandemic.