Is the End of the COVID-19 Pandemic Approaching?

The Director-General of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, expressed hope that the COVID-19 pandemic will end in 2023, after three years since its declaration as a global pandemic. He revealed that "the weekly death toll from COVID-19 has, for the first time, fallen below the number at the time of the pandemic's announcement in March 2020." He emphasized in a statement published on the organization's website the "necessity of learning from the pandemic so that the cycle of panic and neglect that characterized a long period of the pandemic response does not recur." Chinese authorities reported to the World Health Organization on December 31, 2019, about an outbreak of unknown pneumonia in the city of Wuhan in central China. In early January 2020, China officially announced that a new type of coronavirus was the cause of the outbreak of the unknown viral pneumonia, before Ghebreyesus declared on March 11, 2020, that the spread of the novel coronavirus had reached pandemic status.