The coronavirus outbreak was Wednesday declared a pandemic by the World Health Organisation (WHO), whose chief expressed his “deep concern” over “alarming levels of inaction” in combating the virus spread.
WHO chief Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the number ofcases outside China had increased 13-fold over the past two weeks.
However, he clarified that the labelling of it as apandemic, or a disease spreading in multiple countries around the worldsimultaneously, did not mean the WHO was changing its advice about whatcountries should do and he called on governments to change the course of theoutbreak by taking “urgent and aggressive action”, the BBC reported.
“Several countries have demonstrated that this viruscan be suppressed and controlled.
“The challenge for many countries who are now dealingwith large clusters or community transmission is not whether they can do thesame – it’s whether they will,” he said, noting that the governments hadto “strike a fine balance between protecting health, minimising disruptionand respecting human life”.
There are now over 118,000 cases of COVID-19, the diseasecaused by the virus, in 114 countries around the world.
The WHO continues to closely monitoring spread of the virus,said Tedros Adhanom during the announcement. “We are deeply concerned both bythe alarming levels of spread and severity, and by the alarming levels ofinaction,” he said. “We have called every day for countries to take urgent andaggressive action.”
There are large outbreaks of the virus in Italy, SouthKorea, and the United States. In the US, the slow rollout of testing andlimited testing capacity has crippled response to the disease.
The spread of the virus can still be controlled, Adhanomsaid. He pointed to both China and South Korea, where outbreaks appear to bedeclining. “It’s doable.”
A pandemic is the “worldwide spread of a new disease,”according to the WHO. There’s no cut-and-dry criteria for what reaches thelevel of pandemic and what does not, and there is no threshold of cases ordeaths that triggers the definition.
The WHO classified the novel coronavirus as a global publichealth emergency on January 30th. Until now, they’ve been reluctant to call theoutbreak a pandemic over concerns that it would incite unnecessary panic,though they’d been warning countries to prepare for a pandemic.
“Using the word pandemic now does not fit the facts, but itmay certainly cause fear,” Adhanom said at a press briefing at the end ofFebruary. “What we see are epidemics in different parts of the world affectingdifferent countries in different ways.”
Countries around the world, including in the US, havealready been leaning on pandemic preparedness plans to respond to outbreaks ofthe new coronavirus.
The last time the WHO declared a pandemic was during theH1N1 outbreak in 2009, which infected nearly a quarter of the world’spopulation. However, that decision was criticized for creating unnecessarypanic. SARS was not considered a pandemic, despite affecting people in 26 countries,and neither was MERS.