"As we enter the fourth year of the pandemic, we are certainly in a much better position now than we were a year ago, when the Omicron wave was at its peak, and more than 70,000 deaths were being reported to WHO each week," WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told the committee at the start of Friday's meeting, Report informs.
Tedros said the weekly death rate had dropped below 10,000 in October but had been rising again since the start of December, while the lifting of Covid restrictions in China had led to a spike in deaths.