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On 5th May, the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared that the Covid-19 pandemic is no longer a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC)—the highest possible level of alarm that mandates countries to act under international health regulations.
A statement on the WHO website says that the decision to downgrade Covid on 5 May “does not mean the pandemic itself is over, but the global emergency it has caused is, for now”.
The WHO said the announcement meant Covid is no longer considered an “unusual or unexpected event”, and it was widely reported as being a major step towards ending the pandemic. But some media outlets reported the pandemic as “officially over”, despite the fact that neither the WHO nor the UK Government has declared this.
This is worrying because bad information about health policy can foster distrust of medical professionals, and distract from or undermine medical consensus and public health messaging.
It’s worth noting that the WHO told Full Fact it is unlikely the Covid pandemic, which is now in its fourth year, will be declared over in the near future. Some diseases may be considered pandemics for many years. In its response to Full Fact, the WHO referenced cholera, which has been an ongoing pandemic since 1961.
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FACT CHECK
In a recent column for the Sun, the businesswoman and Conservative peer Karren Brady claimed that 140,000 “ghost children” disappeared from school during the pandemic and “never came back”.
Baroness Brady repeated the claim a day later on Twitter, writing: “There are a reported 140k children who went missing in pandemic home-schooling & never came back.” Claims similar to this have been repeated many times since the Covid-19 lockdowns.
The figure of 140,000 children used by Baroness Brady may have been taken from a report by the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) thinktank, or from government statistics published in March 2023 (on which the CSJ’s report is based). It describes the number of children in England who were “severely absent” in the 2022 summer term—that is, missed at least 50% of possible school sessions (a school day is split into two sessions, morning and afternoon). It does not describe the number of children who left school and “never came back”.
After being contacted by Full Fact, the Sun corrected the line in Baroness Brady’s column. Baroness Brady did not respond to a request for comment but her tweet has since been deleted.
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FACT CHECK
During an interview on Sky News on Wednesday, 10 May, immigration minister Robert Jenrick MP claimed that the UK is “second only to Sweden” in the number of refugees accepted through resettlement schemes, and “fourth in the world” in the number of people taken “from the United Nations”.
The UK is second only to Sweden in the number of refugees accepted through official resettlement schemes operated in partnership with the UNHCR in Europe, and fourth in the world. These figures don’t include refugees resettled or granted visas through specific UK schemes for Afghan and Ukrainian nationals. But this doesn’t tell the whole story. Other European countries have resettled more refugees relative to their populations, as well as more asylum seekers.
Data from the University of Oxford’s Migration Observatory shows that between 2008 and 2021 (the latest year for which data was available when the briefing was published) the UK was 11th among EU+ countries (the 27 EU countries, plus Norway, Iceland, Liechtenstein and the UK) for the number of refugees accepted under resettlement programmes relative to its population, resettling approximately 4.98 refugees per 10,000 people.
By comparison, Norway settled 31.21 refugees per 10,000 people—the most of any EU+ country relative to its population.
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