The World Health Organization announced today that coronavirus-induced viral pneumonia is a pandemic. There are now more than 118,000 cases of the virus-caused disease COVID-19 in 114 countries around the world.
WHO says the pandemic is "a global spread of new diseases." There are no strict criteria for reaching a pandemic level, nor is there a case or death threshold that triggers this definition.
In other words, the "pandemic" feature does not refer to the severity of the disease, but to the extent of the spread of the disease.
WHO listed the novel coronavirus as a global public health emergency on January 30. No pandemic has been defined as a pandemic until now.
Because the WHO is concerned about causing unnecessary panic globally, although they have been warning countries to prepare for a pandemic.
"The use of the term pandemic now is not true, but it will certainly cause panic," Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the WHO
said at a press conference in late February. "What we see is that epidemics are different around the world. The way it affects different countries. "
Countries around the world have begun to rely on pandemic preparedness plans to respond to new coronavirus outbreaks.
The last time WHO declared a pandemic was during the H1N1 outbreak in 2009, which infected nearly a quarter of the world's population. However, the decision was criticized for creating unnecessary panic.
Despite affecting people in 26 countries, SARS has not been considered a pandemic, and MERS has not been considered a pandemic.
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