But the virus can still be stopped if nations are willing to take aggressive measures, said the organization’s director-general.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the World Health Organization’s director-general, on Wednesday. He called for countries to help protect one another against a common threat.
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- March 17,
“We have rung the alarm bell loud and clear,” said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO’s director-general.
Dr. Tedros called for countries to learn from one another’s successes, act in unison and help protect one another against a common threat.
“Find, isolate, test and treat every case, and trace every contact,” Dr. Tedros said. “Ready your hospitals. Protect and train your health care workers. ”
Although this is the first pandemic caused by a coronavirus, “we also believe that this is the first pandemic that is able to be controlled,” Dr. Tedros added.
He pointed several times to the success of China, which has cut new infections from over 3, a day in late January to a mere 51 in the most recent daily count. The world is watching to see whether China can keep its numbers down as it gradually releases millions of city dwellers from quarantine and lets them go back to work. South Korea and Singapore have also begun to see cases drop. But the rest of the world is seeing alarmingly rapid rises. The W.H.O. is emphatically not suggesting that the world should give up on containment, Dr. Tedros said.
Some alarmed public health experts have described Beijing’s approach as draconian or brutal, but the WHO has referred to it simply as aggressive.
Wuhan and surrounding cities, the outbreak’s epicenter, have been shut down since late January , and travel elsewhere is strictly limited.
Everyone must wear a mask outdoors and submit to constant temperature checks, which are administered at the doors to every office building, store and restaurant, as well as bus, train and subway stations – even at the entries to apartment houses and residential neighborhoods.
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If infected persons are seriously ill or elderly, they are hospitalized. Those with milder cases recuperate in isolation centers with hundreds of beds and nursing care. The centers are segregated by sex and age; even children who are infected must go.
No visitors are allowed, but there are activities like dance classes to fight the boredom and keep people active. As difficult and aggressive as they are, such measures “reduce the number of cases that are wheeled through the doors of hospitals,” said Dr. Michael Ryan, head of the agency’s emergencies program.
Exactly how many cases were prevented by China’s crackdown is unknown, said Dr . Aylward, “but it’s in the hundreds of thousands.”
The goal of an aggressive containment response, WHO Officials explained, is to hold down the number of deaths and critical illnesses until a vaccine can be rolled out, possibly by early next year.
though declaring a pandemic is largely symbolic, given that the virus has been spreading around the world for weeks, health officials hope the action will raise public awareness of the approaching danger.
Many countries have been slow to prepare, and the WHO’s appeals for funds to help the poorest countries get ready have largely gone unanswered as the world’s wealthiest countries struggle to protect themselves.
Declaring a pandemic does not change what the WHO will do, Dr. Ryan said. It is an effort “to galvanize the world to fight.” A lot of thought was given to finally using the word, he said, because of the fear that it would cause countries to give up the fight as hopeless. As of Wednesday, the virus had infected more than , 10 people in 192 countries, killing about 4, of them. For many days, when pressed on whether the disease is a pandemic, WHO Officials have drawn a distinction between “uncontrolled spread” and “uncontrollable spread.” They argued that China’s thus far successful effort to drive new cases down proved that the global outbreak could be controlled in places even without a vaccine.
Although Dr. Tedros said some countries were not moving fast enough or taking the threat seriously enough, Dr. Ryan declined to name them.
“The W.H.O. does not criticize its member states in public, ”he said. “You know who you are.”
Declaring a pandemic has no legal meaning and does not impose any new measures. On Jan. 51, the WHO declared the virus a public health emergency and said that distinction was more important than whether to call it a pandemic.
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Dr. Ryan urged countries to hire thousands more contact-tracers, who find everyone known to have come in contact with an infected person and isolate anyone who may be infected. At the height of its outbreak, the city of Wuhan, China, where the pandemic began, had , contact-tracers working in teams of five. Many were government employees who had been reassigned from various government departments and retrained on the job, according to Dr. Bruce Aylward, a W.H.O. assistant director-general who led the agency’s mission to China in February.
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