The US has declared a transition point for the pandemic: Are we ready for the end of the PHEIC? Dr. Josh Karim says the problem is not in the past

It is important to distinguish between the decision of individual countries to end public-health emergencies and the end of the PHEIC. The US has announced that its health emergency will end on 11 May. Some US residents may not have access to free COvid-19 testing, vaccines or treatment as a result of that. “It will worsen the inequity in the access to diagnostics and treatments, and that’s my concern,” Karim says.

The announcement didn’t come as a surprise. The emergency committee had a meeting in late January, in which Tedros acknowledged the existence of a transition point for the Pandemic.

This is not simply a decision in a few moments. He said during the press conference that the decision was made on the basis of a careful analysis of the data.

He is concerned about the effects on resources, the availability of tests, and treatments, even though he believes the decision was pragmatic and reasonable.

The director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University says it is not certain if the decision will have much of an effect as many countries have already been relaxing measures against COVID-19. “Political attention to the pandemic was lost long before this decision, unfortunately,” Nuzzo says. COVID remains a top cause of death, but governments have decided to put their energy elsewhere.

“A really big worry is that we haven’t really learned enough from this very traumatic, prolonged disaster that was global in scope,” says Josh Michaud, an associate director for global health policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit research group. Many serious problems persisted throughout the pandemic, like lack of funding for pandemic responses, inequitable distribution of tests and vaccines, and poor public messaging. “If we don’t fix those institutions, those processes, there’s every reason to believe we’d go down a similar road in a future pandemic,” he says.

According to data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, new cases, hospitalizations and deaths are all down in the US. That’s true of cases and deaths in the EU. But when the US ends its emergency on May 11, the CDC will stop tracking community levels of transmission and instead will track overall hospitalization and death rates. Local data will no longer be provided after the emergency declaration.

It will be difficult for public health officials to convey the risk of a future variant because of the shift. “The messaging around ‘it’s over, we’ve won’ is setting us up for a huge betrayal of trust if there is another variant that shows up,” says Sam Scarpino, a professor of health sciences and computer science at Northeastern University. It will be difficult to get the public to buy into the idea of taking updated vaccines if there is no trust. Just 17 percent of people in the US received last year’s bivalent booster shot, according to the CDC, and only 14 percent of people in the EU have their third booster.