OTTAWA — Health Minister Jean-Yves Duclos says the impact of COVID-19 is still with us even after the World Health Organization declared earlier today that the illness no longer qualifies as a global emergency.

The declaration made in Geneva is a symbolic end to the devastating coronavirus pandemic that triggered once-unthinkable lockdowns, upended economies and killed millions of people worldwide.

But Duclos says while it's the end of an emergency, it's not the end of the threat.

He says Canadians need to remember that 60,000 people in this country have died of COVID-19 and that it is still killing people and putting others in hospital every day.

He says it is clear that the health-care system was damaged by the last three years, and the failures of long-term care that COVID-19 exposed need to be fixed.

The WHO declared the novel coronavirus an international crisis on March 11, 2020.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published May 5, 2023.

The Canadian Press