GLOBAL HEALTH EMERGENCY: Death toll rise to 259 and 11,791 cases
World Health Organization (WHO) declares Wuhan Coronavirus a Global Health Emergency
The
World Health Organization said the fast-spreading coronavirus that’s
infected more than 11,791 across the world is a global health emergency - a rare designation that helps the international agency mobilize
financial and political support to contain the outbreak.
The
announcement comes just hours after the U.S. confirmed its first
human-to-human transmission of the virus, which has killed at least 259
people in China and has now spread to at least 22 other countries.
Since
emerging less than a month ago in Wuhan, China, the coronavirus has
infected more people than the 2003 SARS epidemic, which sickened roughly 9,821 people across the globe over nine months. As of Friday, there
are at least eight cases in six countries, outside of China, of
human-to-human transmission of the new coronavirus.
“Over
the past few weeks we have witnessed the emergence of a previously
unknown pathogen that has [resulted in] an unprecedented outbreak,” WHO
Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said during a press
conference at the organization’s Geneva headquarters. “We
must act together now to limit the spread.”
WHO defines a global
health emergency, also known as a “public health emergency of
international concern,” as an “extraordinary event” that is “serious,
unusual or unexpected.”
The
“continued increase in cases and the evidence of human-to-human
transmission outside of China are, of course, most deeply disturbing,”
Tedros said in a separate press conference. “Although the
numbers outside China are still relatively small, they hold the
potential for a much larger outbreak.”
The illness
produces a range of symptoms, with about 20% of the patients developing
severe illnesses, including pneumonia and respiratory failure, he said.
While the
WHO has only applied the emergency designation five times
since the rules were implemented in the mid-2000s. The last time WHO
declared a global health emergency was in 2019 for the Ebola outbreak in
eastern Congo that killed more than 2,000 people. The agency also
declared global emergencies for the 2016 Zika virus, the 2009 H1N1 swine
flu and the 2014 polio and Ebola outbreaks.
One
of the criteria used to determine whether the coronavirus is an
international health threat is whether the disease spreads locally once
it arrives in new parts of the world, “and that’s a nuanced and
important distinction to make,” Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of the
WHO’s health emergencies program.
The other main
criteria is whether it’s already interfered or will likely interfere
with trade and travel, he said. The WHO committee’s goal, he said, is to
contain an outbreak without needlessly disrupting economic activity
just by declaring a global health crisis.
The WHO declined at two emergency meetings last week to declare the virus a global health emergency.
Declaring
an emergency doesn’t give the WHO extra funding or power, but it allows
Tedros to make recommendations, including whether countries should
impose travel or trade bans. It can also mobilize public health
resources and galvanize public and political action.
“It signals
that the world must be on the alert for a major event”. Coronaviruses
are a large family of viruses that usually infect animals but can
sometimes evolve and spread to humans. The new virus is similar to the
flu and can cause coughing, fever, breathing difficulty and pneumonia.
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