"India had reached this status a year ago," Dr Chandrakant Lahariya, a public health and policy expert, told FIT, in response to World Health Organisation's (WHO) declaration that COVID-19 is no longer a global public health emergency.
“For more than a year, the pandemic has been on a downward trend with population immunity increasing from vaccination and infection, mortality decreasing, and the pressure on health systems easing,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus had said, in a press conference on 5 May.
"Pandemic is a situation when multiple countries have an outbreak or epidemic going on. Till mid-2022, most countries were still facing country-level outbreaks. While hardly anything changes for India, there is a certain reporting requirement that countries must adhere to when there is a public health emergency; this may change now," Dr Lahariya told FIT.