The head of the UN World Health Organization (WHO) has declared “with great hope” an end to COVID-19 as a public health emergency, stressing that it does not mean the disease is no longer a global threat.

“Last week, COVID-19 claimed a life every three minutes – and that’s just the deaths we know about”, said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General, briefing the media at the agency’s headquarters in Geneva.

According to WHO’s Coronavirus Dashboard which has collated key statistics since early in the pandemic, the cumulative cases worldwide now stand at 765,222,932, with nearly seven million deaths: the precise figure currently stands at 6,921,614.

As of 30 April, a total of more than 13.3 billion vaccine doses have been administered worldwide.

He said the virus - first made a public health emergency of international concern by the WHO chief on 30 January, 2020 - was here to stay: “It is still killing and it is still changing. The risk remains of new variants emerging that cause new surges in cases and deaths”.

He said that the decision had not been made lightly. For the past year, the WHO-led Emergency Committee had been carefully examining the data, on the right time to lower the alarm.

For over 12 months, the pandemic “has been on a downward trend”, he said, with immunity increasing due to the highly effective vaccines developed in record time to fight the disease, and infections. Death rates have decreased and the pressure on once overwhelmed health systems, has eased.

“This trend has allowed most countries to return to life as we knew it before COVID-19”, - Tedros added.