On the same day that the World Health Organization declared that the COVID-19 pandemic is no longer a global public health emergency, the latest data from the CDC shows that none of Illinois' 102 counties are at a high COVID-19 community level.
The WHO declaration comes just six days before the federal emergency put in place by the U.S. government is slated to end.
WHO said that even though the emergency phase was over, the pandemic hasn't come to an end, noting recent spikes in cases in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. The U.N. health agency says that thousands of people are still dying from the virus every week.
In Illinois, the continued decrease in cases arrives in the seventh consecutive week of zero counties in the state being at a "high" COVID-19 community level.
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With the impending end of both the WHO and federal government declarations, reporting of COVID-19 data will once again change in Illinois.
Illinois health officials announced that community level data for each county in the state will no longer be reported after the end of the federal emergency on May 11.
Additionally, hospitals will no longer be required to report the number of patients who are in the ICU or on ventilators with COVID-19.
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State health officials will continue to report COVID-19 hospital admissions, cases, deaths and weekly vaccination data after the end of the federal emergency, with wastewater surveillance continuing to monitor COVID-19 and influenza.
Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Illinois health officials have reported a total of 4,135,808 cases and 36,850 deaths.
Dr. Sameer Vohra, the Director of the Illinois Department of Public Health, sees the WHO declaration as the beginning of a new era, while cautioning that the virus has not disappeared.
"If you're in a vulnerable group, it's still important to be and use those protective measures as much as possible, to protect yourself, protect your loved ones. But I think it's a good moment for us to say that you know, we're a new normal and we're writing new chapters in the story of public health," Vohra told NBC 5.
Dr. Ngozi Ezike, the CEO of Sinai Chicago and former Director of the IDPH, echoed a similar sentiment, calling the declaration a confirmation of a transition past the pandemic.
"We've been feeling that change, you know, probably for [several] months up to a year. And so really being able to understand that doesn't mean that the virus has gone into a cave to never be seen again. But that you know, we have to think of it as other infectious diseases that we have to deal with and live with and, you know, live accordingly," Ezike told NBC 5.
When the U.N. health agency first declared the coronavirus to be an international crisis on Jan. 30, 2020, it hadn't yet been named COVID-19 and there were no major outbreaks beyond China.
More than three years later, the virus has caused an estimated 764 million cases globally and about 5 billion people have received at least one dose of vaccine.
In the U.S., the public health emergency declaration made regarding COVID-19 is set to expire on May 11, when wide-ranging measures to support the pandemic response, including vaccine mandates, will end. Many other countries, including Germany, France and Britain, dropped many of their provisions against the pandemic last year.
Most recently, WHO has been struggling to investigate the origins of the coronavirus, a challenging scientific endeavor that has also become politically fraught.
After a weeks-long visit to China, WHO released a report in 2021 concluding that COVID-19 most likely jumped into humans from animals, dismissing the possibility that it originated in a lab as “extremely unlikely.”
But the U.N. agency backtracked the following year, saying “key pieces of data” were still missing and that it was premature to rule out that COVID-19 might have ties to a lab.
A panel commissioned by WHO to review its performance criticized China and other countries for not moving quicker to stop the virus and said the organization was constrained both by its limited finances and inability to compel countries to act.
