TIRANA – The World Health Organization (WHO) has declared the novel coronavirus a pandemic as it has spread in more than 100 countries around the world.
COVID-19, the illness caused by the new coronavirus, has sickened more than 121,000 people and killed over 4,300 people. In Albania it claimed the first victim while the number of affected people is up to 12 on Wednesday, according to official sources.
“WHO has been assessing this outbreak around the clock, and we’re deeply concerned both by the alarming levels of spread and severity and by the alarming levels of inaction,” the WHO’s director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, told reporters in Geneva on Wednesday.
The WHO defines a pandemic as “the worldwide spread of a new disease.” The determination is based on the geographic spread of a disease, the severity of illnesses it causes, and its effects on society.
“Pandemic is not a word to use lightly or carelessly,” Tedros continued. “It is a word that, if misused, can cause unreasonable fear or unjustified acceptance that the fight is over, leading to unnecessary suffering and death.”
Tedros and his colleagues emphasized that all countries needed to “double down” and “be more aggressive” in their approach to containing the illness and mitigating its spread, including by using basic public-health tools like contact tracing.
“If countries detect, test, treat, isolate, trace, and mobilize their people in their response,” he said, “those with a handful of cases can prevent those cases from becoming clusters and those clusters from becoming community transmissions.”
A pandemic is a characterization and a call to action, not a reason to give up, the WHO says
The word “pandemic” comes from the Greek “pan” and “demos,” meaning “all the people,” but using it does not change that much from a pragmatic, disease-fighting perspective. The WHO had been hesitant to refer to this coronavirus outbreak as a pandemic in recent weeks, fearing that the moniker would lead to widespread panic and saying it was perhaps not yet warranted.
The organization in January declared the coronavirus outbreak a “global health emergency,” its highest level of alarm, which it reserves for the most serious, sudden, unexpected outbreaks that cross international borders and might require a coordinated response between countries.
This is the first time the pandemic designation has been used for a coronavirus. The last time a pandemic influenza surfaced was in 2009. /argumentum.al/
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