The World Health Organization (WHO) has officially declared the new coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) a pandemic as the number of infection continues unabated worldwide.
Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of WHO, announced this in a press briefing on Wednesday evening (UAE Time).
There are three main criteria that make a disease a pandemic – sustained person-to-person transmission, evidence of worldwide spread and a disease that can cause sudden illness or death.
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“Pandemic is not a word to use lightly or carelessly. It is a word that, if misused, can cause unreasonable fear, or unjustified acceptance that the fight is over, leading to unnecessary suffering and death,” he said.
The director-general said there was never before a declaration of a pandemic sparked by a coronavirus.
Despite this, Dr. Tedros emphasized that all countries can still change the course of this pandemic.
He cited that there are still 81 countries that have not reported any Covid-19 cases, and 57 countries have reported 10 cases or less.
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“If countries detect, test, treat, isolate, trace, and mobilize their people in the response, those with a handful of Covid-19 cases can prevent those cases becoming clusters, and those clusters becoming community transmission,” he added.
He also cited the dwindling cases of Covid-19 in two heavily affected countries of China and South Korea.
Finally, Dr. Tedros call on all countries to activate and scale up their emergency response mechanisms, communicate with their people about the risks and how they can protect themselves, find, isolate, test and treat every Covid-19 case and trace every contact, ready their hospitals, protect and train their health workers, and look out for each other.
