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The World Health Assembly certified that smallpox had been wiped from the earth - the only human disease ever eradicated. The last natural case had been in Somalia in 1977, and the campaign that found it had traced and vaccinated outwards from every case for a decade.

Eight months after the first cases in Guinea, the WHO declared the Ebola epidemic in West Africa a public health emergency of international concern. It became the largest Ebola outbreak in history: more than 28,000 cases and 11,000 deaths across Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.

Six weeks after declaring a public health emergency, the WHO's Director-General told a Geneva briefing that COVID-19 could be characterised as a pandemic - 118,000 cases in 114 countries at the time. Most of the world's lockdowns began within a fortnight.

Three years and three months after declaring it, the WHO ended COVID-19's status as a public health emergency of international concern. The Director-General was careful to say the virus was not gone - only that it no longer needed emergency governance.