The COVID-19 pan­dem­ic isn’t over. It still lurks among pop­u­la­tions across the world, can still cause se­vere res­pi­ra­to­ry ill­ness and death and must still be tak­en very se­ri­ous­ly.

While it is no longer a glob­al pub­lic health emer­gency, as stat­ed in an an­nounce­ment by the World Health Or­ga­ni­za­tion (WHO) yes­ter­day, the dis­ease is still out there and thou­sands of peo­ple are still dy­ing from it every week, while mil­lions of oth­ers con­tin­ue to strug­gle with its de­bil­i­tat­ing, long-term ef­fects.

That is why the WHO did not de­clare the end of the pan­dem­ic. In fact, WHO Di­rec­tor-Gen­er­al Dr Tedros Ad­hanom Ghe­breye­sus took pains to point out yes­ter­day: “The virus is here to stay. It is still killing.”

What must be kept firm­ly in fo­cus, as the world tran­si­tions to a new phase of COVID-19 pre­ven­tion and con­trol, are the hard lessons learnt dur­ing the acute stage of the pan­dem­ic, when most so­cial and eco­nom­ic ac­tiv­i­ty ground to a halt and trav­el and trade links were dis­rupt­ed.

There are loss­es from COVID-19 which can­not be quan­ti­fied up to this day—and that is in ad­di­tion to the of­fi­cial death toll of sev­en mil­lion, which some ex­perts con­sid­er to be a con­ser­v­a­tive fig­ure.

Here in T&T, where cit­i­zens en­dured months of closed bor­ders, lock­downs, a state of emer­gency and the can­cel­la­tion of Car­ni­val, the eas­ing of pub­lic health re­stric­tions was in­ter­pret­ed by some as a re­turn to pre-pan­dem­ic con­di­tions.

There is no longer any alarm over the rates of in­fec­tions, hos­pi­tal­i­sa­tions and deaths, what re­mains of the par­al­lel health sys­tem is no longer an area of pub­lic fo­cus and there is al­most no in­ter­est in get­ting pre­ven­ta­tive vac­ci­na­tions and boost­er shots.

And this is where the task of T&T’s pub­lic health pro­fes­sion­als gets more chal­leng­ing, since they have to en­sure that pub­lic aware­ness is main­tained about the pres­ence of the con­stant­ly mu­tat­ing coro­n­avirus.

The mes­sage to this pop­u­la­tion must be that a low­er risk of in­fec­tion is very dif­fer­ent to no risk of in­fec­tion. The lat­ter is on­ly pos­si­ble if COVID-19 is erad­i­cat­ed from the world, which hasn’t hap­pened yet.

For now, it is im­por­tant to re­mind cit­i­zens to pro­ceed with cau­tion. The spec­tre of a dis­ease that in­fect­ed more than 750 mil­lion still lurks in the shad­ows.

More than three years af­ter the de­c­la­ra­tion by the WHO on March 11, 2020, of the out­break of a glob­al pan­dem­ic, there is still a great deal to be dis­cov­ered about the SARS-CoV-2 virus and ex­act­ly how it spread to hu­mans in Wuhan, Chi­na, in De­cem­ber 2019.

The day af­ter that WHO an­nounce­ment, T&T had its first record­ed case of COVID-19, a 52-year-old man who re­turned from Switzer­land. Since then, this coun­try has record­ed 191,496 con­firmed cas­es and 4,390 deaths, in­clud­ing the three fa­tal­i­ties for the pe­ri­od April 19 to May 2 in the lat­est Min­istry of Health up­date.

Those fig­ures in our pop­u­la­tion of 1.4 mil­lion tell of the dev­as­tat­ing ef­fect COVID-19 has had on fam­i­lies and com­mu­ni­ties here and how, at times, the pub­lic health sys­tem was dri­ven to the verge of col­lapse.

That wasn’t all that long ago. With the lat­est WHO an­nounce­ment, the world turns an­oth­er cor­ner away from the days of iso­la­tion and re­stric­tion. How­ev­er, this is just an­oth­er step on the jour­ney of liv­ing with COVID-19.