Now the medics ask: Would lives have been saved if we’d declared it a pandemic sooner?

GRIM MILESTONE: THE CURSE OF CORONAVIRUS IS ONE YEAR OLD

THE CORONAVIRUS pandemic was one year old yesterday.

The grim milestone came as experts were at loggerheads over whether the World Health Organisation should have declared it a pandemic earlier.

Senior figures at the global body have defended the decision not to declare Covid-19 a pandemic until March 11 2020, insisting governments were well aware of the risk.

A year on from the declaration,

WHO director general Dr Tedros Ghebreyesus criticised countries that had failed to heed earlier warnings.

He said describing Covid-19 as a public health emergency of international concern – a move the WHO made on January 30 – was already the “highest level of alarm under international law”.

The organisation has been criticised in some quarters for not using the term pandemic sooner by people who think it would have prompted swifter, more effective containment measures.

Some – notably former US president Donald Trump – claimed the WHO delayed branding Covid-19 a pandemic at the request of China.

Dr Tedros told a briefing that the WHO started holding daily press conferences on the growing threat on February 5, adding: “We continued to sound that alarm loud and clear.

“We continued to warn that the world had another window of opportunity to prepare for and prevent a potential pandemic.

“One of the things we still need to understand is why some countries acted on those warnings while others were slower to react.”

Dr Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO Covid-19 technical lead, said: “We had used the word pandemic or the potential for this to become a pandemic earlier than March 11 because we were setting things in motion to prevent that from happening and many countries did act.

“Many countries that had had some experience of infectious disease – some trauma or some big outbreaks before – to really activate their systems and initiate their systems right away.”

Dr Michael Ryan, executive director of the WHO’s health emergencies programme, said the slow response of some countries could be blamed on their different perception of risk.

“The question is if we had yelled louder, might more people have heard us?” he said.

Mr Trump attacked the WHO for allegedly being in the pocket of China, despite claiming coronavirus was no worse than flu.

PICTURES: PUNIT PARANJPE/AFP/ THOKO CHIKONDI/AP/BERNAT ARMANGUE/AP FIGHT BACK: Top, a woman takes a Covid-19 test in Mumbai; above, from left, Malawi Army Commander Vincent Nundwe receives his jab; more vaccine for Schwaz in Austria, a hotspot for the South Africa variant; a musician plays viola during a Mozart mini-concert for coronavirus patients at a Madrid hospital.