WHO predicts COVID-19 to become a flu-like threat this year.

The director of the World Health Organization (WHO) is "confident" that the COVID-19 pandemic will end in 2023 as a public health emergency of international concern. Weekly cases and deaths have been trending downward globally, with a 26% decrease in weekly deaths from the prior week. However, the WHO is not yet ready to announce the end of the pandemic, stressing the need to determine its origins and calling on China to be transparent in sharing data. Clinical professor of medicine at NYU Langone Medical Center, Dr. Marc Siegel, questions the WHO's hesitancy to signal the end of the international emergency despite the lower weekly COVID death count.