The new coronavirus outbreak is now a pandemic. So what does that mean?
“Pandemic” has nothing to do with how serious the illness is. It means a disease is spreading widely.
The head of the World Health Organization, which made the declaration Wednesday, said the U.N. health agency is deeply concerned about the alarming levels of spread.
“We should double down and we should be more aggressive. That’s what we are saying,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said.
WHAT DOES THE DECLARATION DO?
The label triggers governments to activate preparedness plans and possibly take emergency procedures to protect the public, such as more drastic travel and trade restrictions.
WHO already had declared COVID-19 an international emergency. And where the virus hasn’t yet spread, hospitals and clinics around the world have been preparing for a surge of coronavirus patients on top of the everyday illnesses they treat.
Dr. Michael Ryan, the WHO emergencies chief, cautioned that use of the word pandemic to describe the outbreak “is not a trigger for anything other than more aggressive, more intensive action.”
The term also is likely to stoke global anxiety, something the U.N. health agency was sensitive to. Previously, Tedros acknowledged the word itself “may certainly cause fear” without preventing any infection or saving a single life.
• WHAT GOES INTO THE DECISION?
Exactly when enough places have enough infections to declare a pandemic isn’t a black-and-white decision. But generally, the WHO looks for sustained community outbreaks on different continents.
In other words, people who were in places where the virus was circulating have known risks. If they get sick, the chain of transmission is obvious. And as long as health authorities can trace those chains, an outbreak isn’t yet deemed out of control.
But when people start becoming infected without obvious links, that signals wider spread of an infection throughout a population, key for a pandemic declaration.
For flu, the WHO typically calls a pandemic when a new virus is spreading in two regions of the world; COVID-19 is now spreading in parts of four.
• WHAT WAS THE LAST GLOBAL PANDEMIC?
The last disease the WHO declared a pandemic was a new flu strain, initially called “swine flu,” in 2009. That decision came after the new H1N1 flu had been spreading in multiple countries for about six weeks.
Today, that strain is what’s known as “endemic” worldwide — it became part of every season’s regular flu outbreak.
This is the first time this kind of virus — a coronavirus — has been labeled a pandemic, “but at the same time, we believe that it will be the first also to be able to be contained or controlled,” Tedros said.
