Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, a few human rights academics argued that human rights can be better protected if the governments derogate from international human rights mechanisms during the pandemic. In doing so, these governments clearly separate the regime of emergency from normalcy and hence they limit in time the measures they adopt to fight the pandemic. Article 15 allows such derogations from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). In this short contribution I question the fundamentals of this argument. [---]