The World Health Organization said Friday that it expects to be able to declare an end to the COVID-19 pandemic sometime in 2023 as the illness becomes more like seasonal flu. “A threat to health, a virus that will continue to kill. But a virus that is not disrupting our society or disrupting our hospital systems, and I believe that that will come,” WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters at a Geneva briefing.
The news comes a week after the three-year anniversary of the WHO’s original declaration of a global pandemic and on a day when fresh evidence emerged suggesting the virus came from animal to human transmission and did not escape from a Chinese laboratory, as the Associated Press reported. A group of scientists examined genetic data from samples collected at a market close to where the first human cases of the coronavirus were detected in the city of Wuhan. The samples were not previously available, but were found by a French biologist who spotted them after they were uploaded to the world’s biggest public virus database by in late January by scientists at the Chinese …