The World Health Organization has declared coronavirus a pandemic — an announcement that signals the outbreak has defied efforts to contain it.
The WHO’s announcement does not trigger any new funding, protocols or regulations. But it is an acknowledgment of reality. For weeks, the agency hesitated to make the declaration because officials worried it would create widespread panic.
But in ruling it a pandemic, WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus noted the scale of the outbreak and said he elected to use the word because some countries have not reacted quickly enough.
“We are deeply concerned both by the alarming levels of spread and severity and by the alarming levels of inaction,” Tedros said. “In the days and weeks ahead, we expect to see the number of coronavirus cases, the number of deaths and the number of affected countries to climb even higher.”
Disease experts use the term “pandemic” to describe when an epidemic has become rampant in multiple countries and continents simultaneously. (The term comes from the Greek word “pan,” meaning “all,” and “demos,” meaning “people.”)
While the word may evoke fear, it describes how widespread an outbreak may be, not its deadliness.
In the past, health experts have used “pandemic” as a signal that efforts to contain an outbreak have failed and that countries should focus their efforts more on mitigating its effects through actions such as getting hospitals ready to handle an influx of patients, stockpiling materials and enacting social-distancing policies.
This outbreak has behaved differently, however, and the WHO has stressed in recent weeks that all countries should focus on containment even as they begin ramping up efforts to mitigate. By working to contain the virus, countries can slow down the spread of the disease and buy time to work more on mitigation strategies.
“It would be a mistake to abandon the containment strategy,” Tedros said. “We have never before seen a pandemic sparked by a coronavirus. And we have never before seen a pandemic that can be controlled at the same time.”