World Health Organisation declares coronavirus pandemic as cases soar worldwide
- Infections outside China have risen 13-fold, according to the WHO
- Officials caution countries to step up containment efforts to prevent Covid-19 from overburdening health care workers
The World Health Organisation declared the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic on Wednesday, with 114 countries reporting combined cases that added up to nearly 120,000.
“In the days and weeks ahead we expect to see the number of cases, the number of deaths and the number of affected countries to climb even higher,” WHO chief Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a press briefing in Geneva.
“WHO has been assessing this outbreak around the clock and we are deeply concerned both by the alarming levels of spread and severity, and by the alarming levels of inaction,” he said.
“We have therefore made the assessment that [the disease] Covid-19 can be characterised as a pandemic,” the director general said, referring to the illness caused by the new coronavirus that began spreading globally in January.
Adoption of the new terminology comes as the US, Britain and other countries with rising case counts struggle to come up with emergency responses to the contagion – which causes the potentially deadly respiratory ailment – in the form of stimulus packages and other economic measures.