GENEVA, December 2. /TASS/. Now is not the time to lift the COVID-19-related public health emergency of global concern (PHEIC) which has been in effect since 2020, WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a briefing in Geneva on Friday.

"We are much closer to being able to say that the emergency phase of the pandemic is over - but we’re not there yet," he said. "Gaps in surveillance, testing, sequencing and vaccination are continuing to create the perfect conditions for a new variant of concern to emerge," the official noted, explaining that this new variant "could cause significant mortality."