The World Health Organization (WHO) has declared the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic as the virus continued to spread across the world.
The coronavirus outbreak has been declared a pandemic, the World Health Organization has warned, as the virus continues to spread across the world.
“We expect to see the number of cases, the number of deaths, and the number of affected countries climb even higher,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a press conference at the organization’s headquarters in Geneva.
The virus, officially known as COVID-19, has infected more than 125,000 people in 114 countries, killing more than 4,600.
“One of the biggest challenges we face is that too many affected countries are still not sharing data with WHO,” Dr. Tedros said last month while he blamed some countries for failing to take the outbreak seriously enough.
In the past weeks “the number of cases outside China has increased thirteenfold and the number of affected countries has tripled,” WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said.
“We’re deeply concerned both by the alarming levels of spread and severity, and by the alarming levels of inaction,” he said, just before declaring the pandemic. “We have rung the alarm bell loud and clear.”
There are at least 1,267 cases of the coronavirus in the United States, according to official health agencies. The U.S. death toll is now at 38.
The U.S. State Department has issued a global travel warning of Level 3 — “reconsider travel” while the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has advised Americans to “avoid nonessential travel” to Europe. President Trump has announced that the US “will be suspending all travel from Europe to the United States for the next 30 days.”
Italy is the world’s worst-hit country after China. The European country which is under a lockdown has reported over 15,000 infections and more than 1,000 deaths.
