The coronavirus outbreak sure looks like a pandemic, except to the World Health Organization

As cases of the novel coronavirus surge in Italy, Iran, South Korea, the U.S. and elsewhere, many scientists say itâs plain that the world is in the grips of a pandemic â a serious global outbreak.
The World Health Organization has so far resisted describing the crisis as such, saying the word âpandemicâ might spook the world further and lead some countries to lose hope of containing the virus.
âUnless weâre convinced itâs uncontrollable, why [would] we call it a pandemic?â WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said last week.
The U.N. health agency has previously described a pandemic as a situation in which a new virus is causing âsustained community-level outbreaksâ in at least two world regions.
Many experts say that threshold has long been met: The virus that was first identified in China is now spreading freely in four regions, it has reached every continent but Antarctica, and its advance seems unavoidable. The disease has managed to gain a foothold and multiply quickly even in countries with relatively strong public health systems.
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On Friday, the virus hit a new milestone, having infected more than 100,000 people worldwide, far more than those sickened by SARS, MERS or Ebola in recent years.
âI think itâs pretty clear weâre in a pandemic and I donât know why WHO is resisting that,â said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.
Experts acknowledge that declaring a pandemic is politically fraught because it can rattle markets, lead to more drastic travel and trade restrictions and stigmatize people coming from affected regions. WHO was previously criticized for labeling the 2009 swine flu outbreak a pandemic. But experts said calling this crisis a pandemic could also spur countries to prepare for the virusâ eventual arrival.
WHO already declared the virus a âglobal health emergencyâ in late January, putting countries and humanitarian organizations on notice and issuing a broad set of recommendations to curb its spread.
The coronavirus outbreak is declared a global public health emergency, but does it qualify as a pandemic? We explain the difference and why it matters.
Even in countries that moved quickly to shut down their links to China, COVID-19 has managed to sneak in. Within a matter of weeks, officials in Italy, Iran and South Korea went from reporting single new cases to reporting hundreds.
âWe were the first country to stop flights to China and we were completely surprised by this disease,â said Massimo Galli, an infectious-diseases professor at the University of Milan. âItâs dangerous for the entire world that the virus is able to spread underground like this.â
With more than 7,300 cases, Italy is the epicenter of Europeâs outbreak and has shut down schools, closed sports stadiums to fans and urged the elderly not to go outside unless absolutely necessary. But it has still exported cases of the virus to at least 10 countries, including Austria, the Czech Republic, Spain, South Africa and Nigeria.
Devi Sridhar, a professor of global public health at the University of Edinburgh who co-chaired a review of WHOâs response to the 2014-16 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, said a pandemic declaration is long overdue.
âThis outbreak meets all the definitions for a pandemic that we had pre-coronavirus,â she said.
Once the coronavirus begins to spread, even those who arenât infected will have to deal with school closures, telecommuting and other adjustments.
At a news conference last month, Dr. Mike Ryan, WHOâs emergencies chief, said a pandemic is âa unique situation in which we believe that all citizens on the planetâ will likely be exposed to a virus âwithin a defined period of time.â
Several experts said they hadnât heard that definition. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for its part, defines a pandemic as âan epidemic that has spread over several countries or continents, usually affecting a large number of people.â
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