WHO declares virus crisis a pandemic, urges global fight
GENEVA — Expressing alarm both about mounting infections and inadequate government responses, the World Health Organization declared Wednesday that the global coronavirus crisis is now a pandemic but added that it’s not too late for countries to act.
By reversing course and using the charged word “pandemic” that it had previously shied away from, the U. N. health agency sought to shock lethargic countries into pulling out all the stops.
“We have called every day for countries to take urgent and aggressive action. We have rung the alarm bell loud and clear,” said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO chief.
“All countries can still change the course of this pandemic. If countries detect, test, treat, isolate, trace and mobilize their people in the response,” he said. “We are deeply concerned by the alarming levels of spread and severity and by the alarming levels of inaction.”
Iran and Italy are the new front lines of the battle against the virus that started in China, the WHO said.
“They’re su ering but I guarantee you other countries will be in that situation soon,” said Dr.
Mike Ryan, the WHO’s emergencies chief.
He added that the agency thought long and hard about labeling the crisis a pandemic — meaning a new virus causing sustained outbreaks in multiple regions of the world.
The risk of employing the term, Ryan said, is “if people use it as an excuse to give up.”
But the benefit is “potentially of galvanizing the world to fight.”
Underscoring the mounting challenge: The case count outside China has multiplied 13fold over the last two weeks to over 118,000, with the disease now responsible for nearly 4,291 deaths, WHO said.
With o cials saying that Europe has become the new epicenter, Italy’s cases soared again, to 12,462 infections and 827 deaths — numbers second only to China.
“If you want to be blunt, Europe is the new China,” said Robert Redfield, the head of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Italy considered imposing even tighter restrictions on daily life and announced billions in financial relief Wednesday to cushion economic shocks from the coronavirus, its latest e orts to adjust to the fast-evolving crisis that silenced the usually bustling heart of the Catholic faith, St. Peter’s Square.
In Iran, by far the hardest-hit country in the Middle East, the senior vice president and two other Cabinet ministers were reported to have been diagnosed with COVID- 19, the illness caused by the virus. Iran reported another jump in deaths, by 62 to 354 — behind only China and Italy.
In Italy, Premier Giuseppe Conte said he would consider requests from Lombardy, Italy’s hardest-hit region, to toughen the already extraordinary anti-virus lockdown that was extended nationwide Tuesday. Lombardy wants to shut down nonessential businesses and reduce public transportation.
These measures would be on top of travel and social restrictions that imposed an eerie hush on cities and towns across the country. Police enforced rules that customers stay 3 feet apart and ensured that businesses closed by 6 p.m.
Milan shopkeeper Claudia Sabbatini said she favored the stricter measures. Rather than risk customers possibly infecting each other in her children’s clothing store, she closed it.
“I cannot have people standing at a distance. Children must try on the clothes. We have to know if they will fit,’’ she said.
Still, the e ectiveness of such measures as travel restrictions and quarantines will likely drop substantially as COVID- 19 spreads globally, making it impossible for countries to keep the virus out. Health officials will also need to be more flexible in their coordinated response efforts, as the epicenters are likely to shift quickly and dramatically — as demonstrated by the recent eruptions in Iran and Italy.
Conte emphasized fighting the outbreak must not come at the expense of civil liberties, suggesting that Italy is unlikely to adopt the draconian quarantine measures that helped China push down new infections from thousands per day to a trickle and allowed its manufacturers to restart production lines.