The World Health Organization said Friday that COVID-19 no longer qualifies as a global emergency, marking a symbolic end to the devastating coronavirus pandemic that triggered once-unthinkable lockdowns, upended economies and killed millions of people worldwide.

The announcement, made more than three years after WHO declared the coronavirus an international crisis, offers a coda to a pandemic that stirred fear and suspicion, hand-wringing and finger-pointing across the globe.

The U.N. health agency’s officials said that even though the emergency phase was over, the pandemic hasn’t ended, noting recent spikes in cases in Southeast Asia and the Middle East.

WHO says thousands of people are still dying from the virus every week, and millions of others are suffering from debilitating, long-term effects.

“It’s with great hope that I declare COVID-19 over as a global health emergency,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said.

“That does not mean COVID-19 is over as a global health threat,” he said, adding he wouldn’t hesitate to reconvene experts to assess the situation should a new variant “put our world in peril.”

Tedros said the pandemic had been on a downward trend for more than a year, acknowledging that most countries have already returned to life before COVID-19.

He bemoaned the damage that COVID-19 had done to the global community, saying the pandemic had shattered businesses, exacerbated political divisions, led to the spread of misinformation and plunged millions into poverty.

The political fallout in some countries was swift and unforgiving. Some pundits say missteps by President Donald Trump in his administration’s response to the pandemic had a role in his losing reelection bid in 2020. The United States saw the deadliest outbreak of any country in the world — where more than 1 million people died.

Dr. Michael Ryan, WHO’s emergencies chief, said it was incumbent on heads of states and other leaders to negotiate a wide-ranging pandemic treaty to decide how future health threats should be faced.

Ryan said that some of the scenes witnessed during COVID-19, when people resorted to “bartering for oxygen canisters,” fought to get into emergency rooms and died in parking lots because they couldn’t get treated, must never be repeated.

When the U.N. health agency first declared the coronavirus to be an international crisis on Jan. 30, 2020, it hadn’t yet been named COVID-19 and there were no major outbreaks beyond China.

More than three years later, the virus has caused an estimated 764 million cases globally and about 5 billion people have received at least one dose of vaccine.

In the U.S., the public health emergency declaration made regarding COVID-19 is set to expire on May 11, when wide-ranging measures to support the pandemic response, including vaccine mandates, will end. Many other countries, including Germany, France and Britain, dropped most of their provisions against the pandemic last year.

When Tedros declared COVID-19 to be an emergency in 2020, he said his greatest fear was the virus’ potential to spread in countries with weak health systems.

In fact, some of the countries that suffered the worst COVID-19 death tolls were previously judged to be the best-prepared for a pandemic, including the U.S. and Britain. According to WHO data, the number of deaths reported in Africa account for just 3% of the global total.

WHO doesn’t “declare” pandemics, but first used the term to describe the outbreak in March 2020, when the virus had spread to every continent except Antarctica, long after many other scientists had said a pandemic was already underway.

WHO is the only agency mandated to coordinate the world’s response to acute health threats, but the organization faltered repeatedly as the coronavirus unfolded.

In January 2020, WHO publicly applauded China for its supposed speedy and transparent response, even though recordings of private meetings obtained by The Associated Press showed top officials were frustrated at the country’s lack of cooperation.

WHO also recommended against mask-wearing for the public for months, a mistake many health officials say cost lives.

Numerous scientists also slammed WHO’s reluctance to acknowledge that COVID-19 was frequently spread in the air and by people without symptoms, criticizing the agency’s lack of strong guidance to prevent such exposure.

Tedros was a vociferous critic of rich countries who hoarded the limited supplies of COVID-19 vaccines, warning that the world was on the brink of a “catastrophic moral failure” by failing to share shots with poor countries.

Most recently, WHO has struggled to investigate the origins of the coronavirus, a challenging scientific endeavour that has also become politically fraught.

After a weeks-long visit to China, WHO released a report in 2021 concluding that COVID-19 most likely jumped into humans from animals, dismissing the possibility that it originated in a lab as “extremely unlikely.”

But the U.N. agency backtracked the following year, saying “key pieces of data” were still missing and that it was premature to rule out that COVID-19 might have ties to a lab.

Tedros lamented that the catastrophic toll of COVID-19 could have been avoided.

“We have the tools and the technologies to prepare for pandemics better, to detect them earlier, to respond to them faster,” Tedros said, without citing missteps by WHO specifically.

“Lives were lost that should not have been. We must promise ourselves and our children and grandchildren that we will never make those mistakes again.”
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Environmental groups sue the U.S. government over SpaceX’s launch license. Plus, a pair of spacewalks outside the International Space Station, and a glimpse at the destruction that scientists say awaits our home planet. VOA’s Arash Arabasadi brings us The Week in Space.
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Global temperatures are likely to reach new highs this year with the predicted onset of El Nino, a natural occurring phenomenon typically associated with the warming of the planet.

“The development of an El Nino will most likely lead to a new spike in global heating and increase the chance of breaking temperature records,” said Petteri Taalas, secretary-general of the World Meteorological Organization.

That is bad news for global efforts to reduce climate change. Taalas noted that the onset of El Nino follows the eight warmest years on record “even though we had a cooling La Nina for the past three years and this acted as a temporary brake on global temperature increase.”

El Nino is a naturally occurring climate pattern associated with the warming of ocean surface temperatures in the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean. On the other hand, La Nina refers to the periodic cooling of ocean surface temperatures.

The recent unusually long running La Nina event, which began in 2020 now has ended.

Wilfran Moufouma Okia, head of the WMO regional climate prediction services division, said scientific models show that La Nina currently is in a neutral state and moving toward a different phase.

“The next few months from May to July, we have a 60% chance to enter into an El Nino phase. This likelihood will increase to 70% in the period of July to August, and even to 80% if we go past August,” he said. “But, of course, beyond that we cannot say much.”

He said the evolution of El Nino this year will change the weather and climate pattern worldwide compared to what existed during the past three consecutive years of La Nina.

“If we think of La Nina as a sort of break in the warming engine, La Nina corresponds to a cooling of the ocean, which normally should kind of slow down the rise of temperature, El Nino will fuel the temperature globally.

“So, we are expecting in the coming two years to have a serious increase in the global temperature,” he said.

Scientists say the concentrations of two important greenhouse gases, methane and carbon dioxide, which lead to global warming and climate change, go up significantly during an El Nino year.

The WMO says the effect on global temperatures usually plays out in the year after El Nino’s development and likely will become apparent in 2024.

“The world should prepare for the development of El Nino, which is often associated with increased heat, drought or rainfall in different parts of the world,” said Taalas.

“It might bring respite from the drought in the Horn of Africa and other La Nina-related impacts but could also trigger more extreme weather and climate events.”

For example, the WMO said El Nino is likely to trigger heavy rainfall in parts of southern South America, the southern United States, the Horn of Africa, and central Asia.

In contrast, El Nino can cause severe droughts over Australia, Indonesia, and parts of southern Asia.

WMO chief Talaas warns the extreme weather events that will be unleashed by El Nino “highlights the need for the U.N. ‘Early Warnings for All’ initiative to keep people safe.”

Since no two El Nino events are the same and the effects depend partly on the time of year, meteorologists say the WMO and National Meteorological Hydrological Services will be closely monitoring developments.
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Providing further proof that U.S. children suffered significant learning loss when schools were closed during the COVID-19 pandemic, the National Assessment Governing Board released a report Wednesday that showed test scores measuring achievement in U.S. history and civics fell significantly between 2018 and 2022.

The tests, part of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), commonly known as the “nation’s report card,” were given to hundreds of eighth-grade students across the country. Scores on the U.S. history assessment were the lowest recorded since 1994, while the scores on the civics test fell for the first time ever.

Only 13% of students tested in U.S. history were considered proficient, meaning that they had substantially mastered the material expected of them. That was 1 percentage point lower than in 2018. Another 46% tested at the NAEP “basic” level, meaning they had partial mastery of the material, down 4 percentage points. The remaining 40% of students tested did not meet the bar for basic knowledge, an increase of 6 percentage points.

In civics, 20% of students tested qualified as proficient, and 48% had basic knowledge of the material — both down 1 percentage point from 2018. Another 31% failed to demonstrate even basic knowledge, an increase by 4 percentage points over 2018.

In both cases, declines in proficiency were concentrated among lower-performing students, while achievement among the top 25% of students was little changed.

Further breakdowns of the data indicated that declines were notably larger among racial minorities and lower-income students, indicating that the impact of the pandemic on educational achievement was not evenly distributed across the population.

Echoes of past warnings

The results issued Wednesday, like those of other NAEP assessments released last year, demonstrated that a decline in educational achievement was exacerbated by lengthy school closures during the pandemic.

In a statement, National Assessment Governing Board Chair Beverly Perdue, a former governor of North Carolina, said the results should be a call to action.

“The wake-up calls keep coming,” she said. “Education leaders and policy makers must create opportunities for students to gain the knowledge and skills they need to catch up and thrive. The students who took these tests are in high school today and will soon enter college and the workforce without the knowledge and skills they need to fully participate in civic life and our democracy.”

U.S. lags in education

Even before the pandemic took hold, experts were sounding alarms about the state of education in the U.S. In 2019, the year before pandemic-related shutdowns began, results of the Program for International Student Assessment, commonly known as PISA, showed U.S. students lagging behind their peers in East Asia and Europe.

The results ranked U.S. students 13th in reading, 18th in science, and 37th in mathematics when compared to a global sample of their peers.

Consistently at the top of each category were China, where only four mainland provinces participated, and Singapore. The U.S. consistently trailed its northerly neighbor, Canada, in all three categories. It also lagged the English-speaking United Kingdom and Australia in all categories except reading.

‘New human crisis’

The U.S. was not the only country where learning suffered because of the coronavirus pandemic. In January, the World Bank issued a report describing pandemic-related learning loss as a “mass casualty event” that, at one time or another, forced 1.4 billion students around the world to miss significant time in the classroom.

Stephen Heyneman, professor emeritus of international education policy at Vanderbilt University and the editor in chief of the International Journal of Educational Development, told VOA that the pandemic-related education crisis is “the worst we’ve had in my lifetime.”

In an editorial published in the May edition of the journal, an editorial board made up of nine researchers from universities worldwide assessed evidence of the pandemic’s impact on education and concluded that the world “is on the verge of a new human crisis.”

The researchers confirmed that in the relatively wealthy industrialized countries, known as the Global North, the poor felt pandemic-related educational impacts most deeply, while financially well-off families often could mitigate much of the impact on students.

The news was worse for the relatively poorer countries, often referred to as the Global South.

“In the Global South, the learning challenges have proved multi-dimensional and much harder to tackle, given the triple burden of schooling deprivation, learning inequality and learning poverty,” they found.

The disparities, first noted early in the pandemic, have continued, the researchers found. “The consensus view is that, despite many promising innovations, learning shortfalls have persisted or even increased, three years into the pandemic.”

Frustration

Asked how the U.S. had performed during the pandemic compared with other developed nations, Heyneman said that “comparison evidence, so far, is too little for me to make any generalizations.”

However, he said, he and his colleagues have noticed — and been frustrated by — a common practice that has been adopted by most public school systems around the world as they have reopened.

Rather than assessing where students had pandemic-related deficits and working to correct them before continuing on with standard curriculums, schools have consistently attempted to simply restart, placing students in the classes and grade levels that correspond to their ages rather than to their actual educational attainment.

“They have not tested the learning loss in any systematic way, and when they have tested, they often haven’t released the scores,” he said. “And whether or not they have tested, they have not treated the results as an emergency. That makes me furious.”
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A panel of global health experts will meet Thursday to decide if COVID-19 is still an emergency under the World Health Organization’s rules, a status that helps maintain international focus on the pandemic.

The WHO first gave COVID its highest level of alert on Jan. 30, 2020, and the panel has continued to apply the label ever since, at meetings held every three months.

However, several countries have recently begun lifting their domestic states of emergency, such as the United States.

WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has said he hopes to end the international emergency this year.

There is no consensus yet on which way the panel may rule, advisers to the WHO and external experts told Reuters.

“It is possible that the emergency may end, but it is critical to communicate that COVID remains a complex public health challenge,” said professor Marion Koopmans, a Dutch virologist who is on the WHO panel. She declined to speculate further ahead of the discussions, which are confidential.

One source close to negotiations said lifting the “public health emergency of international concern,” or PHEIC, label could impact global funding or collaboration efforts. Another said that the unpredictability of the virus made it hard to call at this stage.

“We are not out of the pandemic, but we have reached a different stage,” said professor Salim Abdool Karim, a leading COVID expert who previously advised the South African government on its response.

Karim, who is not on the WHO panel, said if the emergency status is lifted, governments should still maintain testing, vaccination and treatment programs.

Others said it was time to move to living with COVID as an ongoing health threat, like HIV or tuberculosis.

“All emergencies must come to an end,” said Lawrence Gostin, a law professor at Georgetown University in the United States who follows the WHO.

“I expect WHO to end the public health emergency of international concern. If WHO does not end it… [this time], then certainly the next time the emergency committee meets.”
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The United States approved the first vaccine for RSV on Wednesday, shots to protect older adults against a respiratory virus that’s most notorious for attacking babies but endangers their grandparents, too.

The Food and Drug Administration decision makes GSK’s shot, called Arexvy, the first of several potential vaccines in the pipeline for RSV to be licensed anywhere.

The move sets the stage for adults 60 and older to get vaccinated this fall — but first, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention must decide if every senior really needs RSV protection or only those considered at high risk from the respiratory syncytial virus. CDC’s advisers will debate that question in June.

After decades of failure in the quest for an RSV vaccine, doctors are eager to finally have something to offer — especially after a virus surge that strained hospitals last fall.

“This is a great first step … to protect older persons from serious RSV disease,” said Dr. William Schaffner, medical director of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases, who wasn’t involved with its development. Next, “we’re going to be working our way down the age ladder” for what’s expected to be a string of new protections.

The FDA is considering competitor Pfizer’s similar vaccine for older adults. Pfizer also is seeking approval to vaccinate pregnant women so their babies are born with some of their mothers’ protection.

There isn’t a vaccine for kids yet, but high-risk infants often get monthly doses of a protective drug during RSV season — and European regulators recently approved the first one-dose option. The FDA also is considering whether to approve Sanofi and AstraZeneca’s one-shot medicine.

“This is a very exciting time with multiple potential RSV solutions coming out after years of really nothing,” said Dr. Phil Dormitzer, chief of vaccine research and development for GSK, formerly known as GlaxoSmithKline.

Potentially life-threatening

RSV is a cold-like nuisance for most people, but can be life-threatening for the very young, the elderly, and people with certain high-risk health problems. It can impede babies’ breathing by inflaming their tiny airways, or creep deep into seniors’ lungs to cause pneumonia.

In the U.S., about 58,000 children younger than 5 are hospitalized for RSV each year and several hundred die. Among older adults, as many as 177,000 are hospitalized with RSV and up to 14,000 die annually.

Why has it taken so long to come up with a vaccine? The field suffered a major setback in the 1960s when an experimental shot worsened infections in children. Scientists finally figured out a better way to develop these vaccines — although modern candidates still were first tested with adults.

Study shows high effectiveness rates

GSK’s new vaccine for older adults trains the immune system to recognize a protein on RSV’s surface, and contains an ingredient called an adjuvant to further rev up that immune reaction.

In an international study of about 25,000 people 60 and older, one dose of the vaccine was nearly 83% effective at preventing RSV lung infections and reduced the risk of severe infections by 94%.

To see how long protection lasts, GSK is tracking study participants for three years, comparing some who get just one vaccination during that time and others given a yearly booster.

Shot reactions were typical of vaccinations, such as muscle pain and fatigue.

There was a hint of a rare but serious risk — one case of Guillain-Barre syndrome, which can cause usually temporary paralysis, and two cases of a type of brain and spinal cord inflammation. The FDA said it was requiring the company to continue studying if there really is a link to the vaccine.

If the CDC ultimately recommends the vaccination for some or even all seniors, it will add another shot for the fall along with their yearly flu vaccine — and maybe another COVID-19 booster.

“We’ll have to educate the population that this virus that not everyone has heard about is actually an important threat to their health in the wintertime,” said Schaffner, an infectious-disease expert at Vanderbilt University.
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Companies with Brazilian forest concessions would be allowed to generate carbon credits under a bill passed by its Congress this week that marks a first step in regulating the country’s voluntary carbon market.

Private firms have shown little interest in a government program that leases publicly owned forests for sustainable logging, but the legislation could boost the concessions’ appeal with investors by generating an additional revenue stream.

“This is an economic activity that will boost others that can be done in forestry concessions,” said Jacqueline Ferreira, a portfolio manager at Instituto Escolhas, an environmental nonprofit involved in consultations on the bill.

President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who now must sign or veto parts or all of the bill within 15 days, has made reining in deforestation a priority as he seeks to reverse the policies of his right-wing predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro.

Forest leased to private firms in Brazil can only be used for logging under a sustainable system that allows the land to regenerate.

Potential to generate millions

Set up in 2006, the leasing program has had limited success, data shows, with only about 1 million hectares of Brazil’s 43 million hectares of eligible public forest leased.

Studying a typical concession in the Amazon state of Rondonia, Escolhas estimated that carbon credit sales could boost its revenue by 43%.

A wider study by the nonprofit of 37 areas that could be leased in the Amazon region estimated that they could generate about $24 million per year from carbon credits in total.

“This was very conservative math, based on carbon credit prices below the (current) market price,” Ferreira said. She noted that further regulation would be needed to detail the mechanism for generating carbon credits.

She said it would likely take at least a year for the first concessions to be leased that include the ability to issue carbon credits.

The current number of carbon credit projects in Brazil are “small in comparison to the unique potential of the country’s forested area,” said Daniel Vargas, coordinator of the Bioeconomy Observatory within Brazil’s FGV university.

Carbon credits face scrutiny

The bill, however, comes as carbon credits generated by forestry projects in the Amazon region and elsewhere face scrutiny because of land rights issues and a lack of benefits for local communities.

“A growing body of research indicates that no real additional protection is being offered by many of the (carbon credit) projects,” said Eugenio Pantoja, a director at IPAM, a nonprofit that works on sustainability in the Amazon.

The voluntary carbon credit market in Brazil is still unregulated, and while the new bill is a step in that direction, broader legislation will be needed, Pantoja said.

The bill should make concessions more profitable, but a major hurdle for legal logging is stiff competition from illegal, deforested timber, said Suely Araujo, senior expert in public policy at Brazil’s Climate Observatory.

“What is truly hindering (forest concessions) is their difficulty in competing with crime,” Araujo said.
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For the first time, scientists have caught a star in the act of swallowing a planet — not just a nibble or bite, but one big gulp.

Astronomers on Wednesday reported their observations of what appeared to be a gas giant around the size of Jupiter or bigger being eaten by its star. The sun-like star had been puffing up with old age for eons and finally got so big that it engulfed the close-orbiting planet.

It’s a gloomy preview of what will happen to Earth when our sun morphs into a red giant and gobbles the four inner planets.

“If it’s any consolation, this will happen in about 5 billion years,” said co-author Morgan MacLeod of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

This galactic feast happened between 10,000 and 15,000 years ago near the Aquila constellation when the star was around 10 billion years old. As the planet went down the stellar hatch, there was a swift hot outburst of light, followed by a long-lasting stream of dust shining brightly in cold infrared energy, the researchers said.

While there had been previous signs of other stars nibbling at planets and their digestive aftermath, this was the first time the swallow itself was observed, according to the study appearing in the journal Nature.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher Kishalay De spotted the luminous outburst in 2020 while reviewing sky scans taken by the California Institute of Technology’s Palomar Observatory. It took additional observations and data-crunching to unravel the mystery: Instead of a star gobbling up its companion star, this one had devoured its planet.

Given a star’s lifetime of billions of years, the swallow itself was quite brief — occurring in essentially one fell swoop, said Caltech’s Mansi Kasliwal, who was part of the study.

The findings are “very plausible,” said Carole Haswell, an astrophysicist at Britain’s Open University, who had no role in the research. Haswell led a team in 2010 that used the Hubble Space Telescope to identify the star WASP-12 in the process of eating its planet.

“This is a different sort of eating. This star gobbled a whole planet in one gulp,” Haswell said in an email. “In contrast, WASP-12 b and the other hot Jupiters we have previously studied are being delicately licked and nibbled.”

Astronomers don’t know if more planets are circling this star at a safer distance. If so, De said they may have thousands of years before becoming the star’s second or third course.

Now that they know what to look for, the researchers will be on the lookout for more cosmic gulps. They suspect thousands of planets around other stars will suffer the same fate as this one did and, eventually, so will our solar system.

“All that we see around us, all the stuff that we’ve built around us, this will all be gone in a flash,” De said.
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Some 258 million people needed emergency food aid last year because of conflict, economic shocks and climate disasters, a U.N. report said Wednesday, a sharp rise from 193 million the previous year.   

“More than a quarter of a billion people are now facing acute levels of hunger, and some are on the brink of starvation. That’s unconscionable,” U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said.   

It was “a stinging indictment of humanity’s failure to make progress… to end hunger, and achieve food security and improved nutrition for all,” he said.   

More than 40% of those in serious need of food lived in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Nigeria and Yemen, the U.N. report said.   

“Conflicts and mass displacement continue to drive global hunger,” Guterres said.   

“Rising poverty, deepening inequalities, rampant underdevelopment, the climate crisis and natural disasters also contribute to food insecurity.”   

In 2022, 258 million people faced high levels of acute food insecurity in 58 countries or territories, up from 193 million in 53 countries the previous year, the report said.   

This overall figure has now increased for the fourth year in a row. 
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In a massive global crackdown on fentanyl trafficking on the darknet, U.S. and international law enforcement agencies have arrested nearly 300 suspects and seized a large cache of drugs, cash, virtual currency and weapons, officials announced on Tuesday.

The law enforcement action dubbed Operation SpecTor spanned three continents and involved the collaboration of eight countries. It was part of a Justice Department initiative led by the FBI known as JCODE, which aims to dismantle online drug markets.

The operation netted 281 arrests, 850 kilograms of drugs, including 64 kilograms of fentanyl or fentanyl-laced narcotics, $53.4 million in cash and virtual currencies and 117 firearms.

The total number of arrests was the most ever for any JCODE operation and more than double that of the previous operation, officials said.

The Justice Department described the takedown as “the largest international law enforcement operation targeting fentanyl and opioid traffickers on the darknet.”

“Our message to criminals on the dark web is this: You can try to hide in the furthest reaches of the internet, but the Justice Department will find you and hold you accountable for your crimes,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said at a press conference in Washington.

Officials said they collaborated with law enforcement agencies in eight countries, including Austria, France, Germany, Netherlands, Poland, Brazil and the United Kingdom.

The operation is part of a broader effort by U.S. law enforcement agencies to curb fentanyl trafficking.

Last month, the Justice Department announced changes against the Sinaloa Cartel, a notorious drug trafficking organization based in Sinaloa, Mexico, and its facilitators around the world.

Garland described the cartel’s fentanyl trafficking operation as “the largest, most violent, and most prolific” in the world.

The Sinaloa is one of two major Mexican cartels that dominate the U.S. fentanyl market. The other one is known as the Jalisco cartel.

Law enforcement officials say the Sinaloa cartel has been flooding drugs into the United States for more than 15 years.

Officials say the cartels cook fentanyl using precursor chemicals imported from China.

The announcement comes at a time when the U.S. is grappling with an opioid overdose crisis that claimed more than 100,000 American lives in the 12-month period ending in August 2022.

Synthetic opioids such as fentanyl were behind more than two-thirds of the deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The alarming spike in fentanyl deaths has prompted Republican demands that the Biden administration label the cartels as foreign terrorist organizations and unleash the full force of the law against them.
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Widespread loneliness in the U.S. poses health risks as deadly as smoking a dozen cigarettes daily, costing the health industry billions of dollars annually, the U.S. surgeon general said Tuesday in declaring the latest public health epidemic.

About half of U.S. adults say they’ve experienced loneliness, Dr. Vivek Murthy said in a report from his office.

“We now know that loneliness is a common feeling that many people experience. It’s like hunger or thirst. It’s a feeling the body sends us when something we need for survival is missing,” Murthy told The Associated Press in an interview. “Millions of people in America are struggling in the shadows, and that’s not right. That’s why I issued this advisory to pull back the curtain on a struggle that too many people are experiencing.”

The declaration is intended to raise awareness around loneliness but won’t unlock federal funding or programming devoted to combatting the issue.

Research shows that Americans, who have become less engaged with worship houses, community organizations and even their own family members in recent decades, have steadily reported an increase in feelings of loneliness. The number of single households has also doubled over the last 60 years.

But the crisis deeply worsened when COVID-19 spread, prompting schools and workplaces to shut their doors and sending millions of Americans to isolate at home away from relatives or friends.

People culled their friend groups during the coronavirus pandemic and reduced time spent with those friends, the surgeon general’s report finds. Americans spent about 20 minutes a day in person with friends in 2020, down from 60 minutes daily nearly two decades earlier.

The loneliness epidemic is hitting young people, ages 15 to 24, especially hard. The age group reported a 70% drop in time spent with friends during the same period.

Loneliness increases the risk of premature death by nearly 30%, with the report revealing that those with poor social relationships also had a greater risk of stroke and heart disease. Isolation also elevates a person’s likelihood for experiencing depression, anxiety and dementia.

The surgeon general is calling on workplaces, schools, technology companies, community organizations, parents and other people to make changes that will boost the country’s connectedness. He advises people to join community groups and put down their phones when they’re catching up with friends; employers to think carefully about their remote work policies; and health systems to provide training for doctors to recognize the health risks of loneliness.

Technology has rapidly exacerbated the loneliness problem, with one study cited in the report finding that people who used social media for two hours or more daily were more than twice as likely to report feeling socially isolated than those who were on such apps for less than 30 minutes a day.

Murthy said social media is driving the increase in loneliness in particular. His report suggests that technology companies roll out protections for children especially around their social media behavior.

“There’s really no substitute for in-person interaction,” Murthy said. “As we shifted to use technology more and more for our communication, we lost out on a lot of that in-person interaction. How do we design technology that strengthens our relationships as opposed to weaken them?”
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