'We have never before seen a pandemic sparked by a coronavirus,” the WHO director-general said Wednesday “
A lab technician begins semi-automated testing for COVID-19 at a lab in Lake Success, New York. Photo: Andrew Theodorakis/Getty Images On Wednesday, the World Health Organization declared that the outbreak of the COVID-19 novel coronavirus has officially reached the level of a pandemic. “We have never before seen a pandemic sparked by a coronavirus,” WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Wednesday. “And we have never before seen a pandemic that can be controlled at the same time.
The last pandemic was caused by the H1N1 flu in 2009 — the same strain as the Spanish flu in 1918 — which killed hundreds of thousands of people across the world. To date, there have been over 120,000 cases of COVID-19 worldwide, resulting in over 4,300 deaths. “In the days and weeks ahead, we expect to see the number of cases, the number of deaths, and the number of affected countries climb even higher,” Tedros said.
The term more commonly used was epidemic, defined by epidemiologist Rebecca S.B. Fischer as “an outbreak over a larger geographic area.” Fischer writes: Meanwhile, Fischer writes that epidemiologists use the term “pandemic” to describe an “epidemic spread[ing] to multiple countries or regions of the world” where the disease is then “sustained in some of the newly affected regions through local transmission,” as the coronavirus has in states including Washington, California, and New York.
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