The coronavirus sweeping across the world is a pandemic, the World Health Organization declared today.
There are now over 118,000 cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus, in 114 countries around the world.
BREAKING
“We have therefore made the assessment that #COVID19 can be characterized as a pandemic”-@DrTedros #coronavirus pic.twitter.com/JqdsM2051A
— World Health Organization (WHO) (@WHO) March 11, 2020
The WHO continues to closely monitoring spread of the virus, said Tedros Adhanom, director general of the WHO, during the announcement. “We are deeply concerned both by the alarming levels of spread and severity, and by the alarming levels of inaction,” he said. “We have called every day for countries to take urgent and aggressive action.”There are large outbreaks of the virus in Italy, South Korea, and the United States. In the US, the slow rollout of testing and limited testing capacity has crippled response to the disease. The spread of the virus can still be controlled, Adhanom said. He pointed to both China and South Korea, where outbreaks appear to be declining. “It’s doable.”
“If countries detect, test, treat, isolate, trace, and mobilize their people in the response, those with a handful of #COVID19 cases can prevent those cases becoming clusters, and those clusters becoming community transmission”-@DrTedros #coronavirus
— World Health Organization (WHO) (@WHO) March 11, 2020
A pandemic is the “worldwide spread of a new disease,” according to the WHO. There’s no cut-and-dry criteria for what reaches the level of pandemic and what does not, and there is no threshold of cases or deaths that triggers the definition. The WHO classified the novel coronavirus as a global public health emergency on January 30th. Until now, they’ve been reluctant to call the outbreak a pandemic over concerns that it would incite unnecessary panic, though they’d been warning countries to prepare for a pandemic.
Countries around the world, including in the US, have already been leaning on pandemic preparedness plans to respond to outbreaks of the new coronavirus.
Equities on Wall Street continued to fall on Wednesday, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropping over 1,000 points on COVID-19 fears. United States Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said that the “first concern” regarding the coronavirus outbreak is…