COVID-19 outbreak 'a pandemic': WHO chief
12 March, 2020
The World Health Organization described the brand new coronavirus as a pandemic for the first time on Wednesday (Mar 11), adding that Italy and Iran were now on the frontline of the condition and other countries would before long join them.
"We are deeply worried both by the alarming levels of propagate and severity and by the alarming degrees of inaction. We have therefore made the assessment that COVID-19 could be characterised as a pandemic," WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus advised a news conference.
He urged the global community to redouble efforts to support the outbreak, saying aggressive procedures could nonetheless play a big function to curb it.
"This is the first pandemic caused by a coronavirus. We can not say this loudly plenty of, or plainly enough, or often enough: all countries can still change the span of this pandemic. This can be the first pandemic which can be managed," he later on tweeted.
While he acknowledged the characterisation didn't change what Who was simply doing or what countries needed to conduct, it sounded an alarm the organisation has not used as far as the virus spreads.
Who also officials have signalled for weeks that they could use the word "pandemic" as an descriptive term but have stressed that it generally does not take legal significance. The Who all no longer includes a category for declaring a pandemic, aside from influenza. The novel coronavirus isn't the flu.
The coronavirus, which emerged in China in December, has spread all over the world, halting sector, bringing flights to a standstill, closing schools and forcing the postponement of sports and concerts.
The WHO declared a public health emergency of international concern, its "highest degree of alarm", on Jan. 30 when there have been fewer than 100 cases of COVID-19 exterior China and eight cases of human-to-human transmitting of the disease.
Now there are a lot more than 118,000 cases in 114 countries and 4,291 persons have died, Tedros said, with the numbers likely to climb.
In the past two weeks the quantity of cases outside China had risen 13-fold, and the number of countries damaged had tripled, a sombre-looking Tedros said, displaying little of his normally upbeat persona.
ON THE FRONTLINE
Mike Ryan, brain of the WHO's emergencies programme, said the problem in Iran was "very serious" and the firm would like to see extra surveillance and more look after the sick.
"We have to move nowadays. Italy and Iran will be in the frontline nowadays. They are battling but I guarantee you various other countries will maintain that situation soon," Ryan said.
Ryan said that some countries were only assessment the elderly or people who had travelled to China and urged them to revise their monitoring and contact-tracing measures and do more to protect health workers subjected to the virus.
He said the knowledge with influenza led many persons to the false bottom line a pandemic was uncontrollable once it started.
The experience of South Korea, Singapore, and China in combating the new virus showed this is incorrect, he said.
"We have observation that tells us that there surely is a strong element of controllability on this disease," he advised the news conference.
"It doesn't mean we will completely stop it but what it can mean will there be is a real likelihood to blunt the curve, there exists a real possibility to bend the curve and reduce the quantity of cases our health system must cope with and present the health system a chance to conserve more lives," he said.
Ryan said healthcare employees found in Iran and Italy were under a lot of stress, citing nearly 900 people in intensive care found in Italy. Confirmed cases across Italy rose to 12,462 on Wednesday, from a past 10,149, with 827 having died.
He as well pointed to shortages of protective equipment, ventilators and oxygen in Iran, where the loss of life toll has topped 350 persons with around 9,000 infected.
"We've made clear that those supplies have become, very brief and we are struggling to find other supplies externally," he said.
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