China coronavirus: WHO in uncharted territory in dealing with emergency in world’s second largest economy
- Experts say the World Health Organisation (WHO) faces an unprecedented challenge in deciding whether to declare China coronavirus a global emergency
- Such decisions are inherently political, and ‘the bigger the player, the more intense and powerful the pressure’
In deciding whether to declare the deadly and rapidly spreading coronavirus a global emergency, world health officials are faced with an unprecedented challenge: China.
Nor has the WHO since had to decide whether to pull the emergency cord on a country so determined to control the information crossing its borders.
The measures were initially designed to help rally international support – financial, operational and medical – for affected regions and to ensure better transparency, but come with the expressed caveat that they should not be used as a reason to economically stigmatise a nation.
Previous PHEIC declarations have been reserved for epidemics in middle-to-low income countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Guinea and Uganda for two separate Ebola outbreaks, Brazil and other Latin American countries with the Zika virus, the return of polio to places like war-torn Syria and Afghanistan, and a global swine flu pandemic in 2009 that started in Mexico.