The World Health Organisation (WHO) has declared the worldwide outbreak of the new coronavirus as a pandemic, with more than 118,000 cases in 114 countries and 4,291 deaths.
“We have called every day for countries to take urgent and aggressive action. We have rung the alarm bell loud and clear,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Wednesday.
“We are deeply concerned both by the alarming levels of spread and severity, and by the alarming levels of inaction. We have, therefore, made the assessment that COVID-19 can be characterised as a pandemic,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a news briefing in Geneva.
“In the past two weeks, the number of COVID-19 cases outside the outbreak epicentre in China has increased 13-fold and the number of affected countries has tripled,” he added.
Leaders from the European Union are promising to do “whatever it takes” to tackle the coronavirus outbreak, which first emerged in China at the end of last year.
The virus continued to spread to the United States and appeared in new countries including Bolivia and Turkey, while Indonesia and Sweden recorded their first deaths.
More than 66,000 people have recovered from the illness around the world, according to John Hopkins University.
