Coronavirus: World Health Organisation upgrades global risk of virus spread to ‘very high’
- WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus tells reporters that issue is ‘clearly of concern’
- Officials stop short of calling the outbreak a ‘pandemic’, citing a lack of conclusive evidence
The World Health Organisation (WHO) on Friday raised the risk of a global spread of coronavirus to “very high” after a week that saw the contagion reach all the world’s inhabited continents.
Daily rises in cases of Covid-19 outside China, where the disease first emerged, now outnumber those within the country. Over 2,300 people in South Korea have contracted the virus, while at least 34 deaths in Iran have made the Middle Eastern country the worst affected region outside China in terms of fatalities.
Asserting that the growing spread outside China was “clearly of concern”, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the United Nations body had now increased its assessment “of the risk of spread and the risk of impact of Covid-19 to very high at global level”. The agency had previously assessed the risk of global spread to be “high”.
WHO officials stopped short of calling the outbreak a “pandemic” on Friday, with health emergency programme director Mike Ryan saying to do so would be “essentially accepting that every human on the planet will be exposed to that virus”.
There was no data yet to support that conclusion, said Ryan, who, alongside Tedros and other WHO officials, was briefing reporters in Geneva.
Some 97 new cases in 11 countries have been traced back to the recent outbreak in Iran, Tedros said. The virus has infected senior members of the government there, including Masoumeh Ebtekar, Iran’s vice-president for women and family affairs.
