And Going, and Going, and Going...

WHO says Covid remains a global emergency but pandemic could near its end in 2023

That's nice. Come back when there's actually something resembling information to share.

One of the things that I was looking for when this whole mess started up was clear guidance. Not only on what governments were going to do, but what the trigger points were. This way, it would be possible to look at the situation as it unfolded, and have a workable idea of what was coming, and what preparations it made sense to take.

No such luck. And I think that this is what drives a lot of the conspiratorial thinking concerning the SARS-CoV-2 situation. (Even calling it an "outbreak" seems strange, after three years.) As much as the public health community here in the United States found its job made more difficult by a lack of public trust, I'm not sure that much has been done to repair that trust. Pushing the World Health Organization to create and publish formal guidelines for when a pandemic starts, and when it ends, might help. It's difficult to make the case to people that three years in, with many people having some level of immunity from vaccination and/or having been sick with the disease, that it's still an emergency. A problem to be dealt with, sure. But after all this time, an emergency seems to be stretching things just a bit. SARS-CoV-2 seems to have passed through its acute phase, and has now become a chronic concern. A rather more serious one than other respiratory viruses, like influenza, but still a chronic concern. The language of emergency doesn't seem to suit things at this state.

“We remain hopeful that in the coming year, the world will transition to a new phase in which we reduce hospitalizations and deaths to the lowest possible level, and health systems are able to manage Covid-19 in an integrated and sustainable way,” [WHO Director-General] Tedros [Adhanom Ghebreyesus] said in a statement.

As the saying goes, hope is not a strategy. If the World Health Organization and other public-health bodies are going to retain credibility, they're going to have to do something more than hope that something changes; especially in the face of a world that is constantly changing. If a 70% drop in the number of serious illnesses doesn't allow for the alert level to be brought down from it's highest point, maybe a more granular scale is in order. Because eventually, things are going to get to a point where no-one feels that these statements are worth listening to. And that could have serious consequences the next time around.