Five years have passed since the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic on March 11, 2020. But before one considers consigning the deadly memories to oblivion, an obvious question remains: Are we really out of the spectre of COVID-19?
As of May 2023, COVID-19 is not a global health emergency. But the SARS-COV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 continues to evolve into new variants, and afflict and kill people. On the day it was declared a pandemic, there were just 0.11 million cases, scattered across 114 nations, with the death toll being 4,291. By January 5 this year, the virus had infected 777 million people, killing over 7 million.
As the outbreak entered its sixth year in January 2025, some 80 countries reported cases (by the thousands). Twenty-four of these 80 countries also reported deaths. The average over the five pandemic years comes to 0.16 million cases and 3,366 deaths a month. WHO says the cases are highly underreported. Wastewater surveillance for SARS-COV-2 virus put the number of cases 2 to 19 times higher than the cases reported to WHO.
It seems that the world is under a self-engineered amnesia. Maria Van Kerkhove, an epidemiologist with WHO, was quoted recently as saying, “The world I live in right now, no one wants to talk about COVID-19. Everyone is acting as though this pandemic didn’t really happen.”
Five years of the pandemic, particularly the 2019-21 period, have reversed a decade of progress in increasing life ex-pectancy at birth and healthy life expectancy at birth. According to the “World Health Statistics 2024”, published by WHO, global life expectancy and healthy life expectancy dropped by 1.8 years and 1.5 years respectively between 2019 and 2021 to reach levels recorded in 2012. A study published in The Lancet, based on the data from the “Global Burden of Disease 2021”, showed that mortality among the older people during the pandemic was the highest in 70 years. This study put the human toll of the pandemic at 16 million. “For adults worldwide, the COVID-19 pandemic has had a more profound impact than any event seen in half a century, including conflicts and natural disasters,” said Austin E Schumacher, an author of the study and assistant professor of health metrics sciences at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, University of Washington. “Life expectancy declined in 84 per cent of countries and territories during this pandemic, demonstrating the devastating potential impacts of novel pathogens,” said Schumacher.
In India, according to a study by Oxford University’s department of sociology, life expectancy was 2.6 years lower in 2020 than 2019. In comparison to high-income countries, this drop in life expectancy is much larger. Aashish Gupta, one of the authors of the study, said, “Marginalised groups already had lower life expectancy, and the pandemic further in-creased the gap between the most privileged Indian social groups, and the most marginalised social groups in India.”
What reminds the world of a novel virus’ unknown wreckages are its long-term impacts that haunt millions of affected people. In the case of COVID-19, this long-term impact has been named Long COVID. WHO defines it as the continuation or development of new symptoms (200 notified ones) three months after the initial SARS-COV-2 infection, lasting for at least two months, with no other explanation for their emergence. Long COVID grips over 400 million people now. It could well be one of the prominent reasons for morbidity in the world. And it will continue to remind us of the widest pandemic ever to strike us.