Thousands of COVID-19 cases still reported every week | Fact check

Chris Mueller, USA TODAY
·3 min read
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Syringes with COVID-19 vaccines are prepared at the L.A. Care and Blue Shield of California Promise Health Plans' Community Resource Center last year in Lynwood, Calif.

The claim: COVID-19 'literally just disappeared'

A June 23 Instagram post (direct link, archive link) claims a disease responsible for a worldwide pandemic has vanished.

"Isn't it crazy how covid literally just disappeared?" reads the post. "The people who were on the wrong side of that one should not be forgiven, ever."

The post was liked more than 31,000 times in three days.

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Our rating: False

Health agencies continue to report thousands of confirmed cases of COVID-19 every week in the U.S. and worldwide. The World Health Organization recently declared the COVID-19 global health emergency over, but its leader said the disease remains a threat.

Thousands hospitalized each week with COVID-19

In early May, the WHO declared COVID-19 was no longer a global health emergency, saying the pandemic had been on a downward trend for more than a year. The public health emergency declared in the U.S. due to COVID-19 ended that same month.

But COVID-19 hasn't vanished, as the post claims.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's COVID Data Tracker shows an average of more than 6,000 people in the U.S. are still being hospitalized with COVID-19 every week. More than 1 million people have died of COVID-19 in the U.S. since the pandemic began, and hundreds of additional deaths continue to be tallied on a weekly basis.

The WHO, meanwhile, reported more than 174,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 worldwide for the week of June 12, along with more than 1,200 deaths. There have been more than 768 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 globally and nearly 7 million deaths, according to the organization's website.

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More than 230 million people in the U.S., or nearly 70% of the population, have completed the primary series of COVID-19 vaccines, which protects people from getting seriously ill, being hospitalized and dying, according to the CDC.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, in his remarks declaring the COVID-19 global health emergency over, emphasized that the declaration did "not mean COVID-19 is over as a global health threat."

"This virus is here to stay," he said. "It is still killing, and it’s still changing. The risk remains of new variants emerging that cause new surges in cases and deaths."

USA TODAY reached out to the social media user who shared the post for comment but did not immediately receive a response.

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Thousands of COVID-19 cases reported every week | Fact check