The World Health Organization (WHO) had on March 11, 2020 declared COVID-19 a pandemic, when over 118,000 cases of the coronavirus illness in over 110 countries and territories around the world were detected and the sustained risk of further global spread. This year will mark the second year since the global health body had announced Covid as a pandemic.
The WHO had declared a public health emergency of international concern — the highest level of alarm in the UN health agency’s regulations — on January 30, 2020, when, outside of China, fewer than 100 cases and no deaths had been reported.
Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO director-general had said, "This is not just a public health crisis, it is a crisis that will touch every sector."
An epidemic refers to an uptick in the spread of a disease within a specific community. In contrary, the WHO defines a pandemic as global spread of a new disease, though the specific threshold for meeting that criteria is fuzzy. The term is most often applied to new influenza strains, and the CDC says it’s used when viruses “are able to infect people easily and spread from person to person in an efficient and sustained way” in multiple regions. The declaration refers to the spread of a disease, rather than the severity of the illness it causes.
SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, is thought to have first jumped from an animal host to humans in Wuhan, China. At least at first, most cases were seen within China and among people who had traveled there, as well as those travelers’ close contacts. While these cases were concerning, they did not suggest a pandemic, because there was not significant spread outside of China.
The WHO last had used the label during the 2009 H1N1 (or “swine flu”) outbreak, but got pushback for that choice. Critics argued that the situation was not serious enough to warrant a pandemic declaration, and that giving it one caused unnecessary panic and precautions.
Is COVID-19 pandemic ending soon? Here's what WHO says:
The pandemic is far from over, the WHO’s director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus insisted Wednesday, two years after he first used the term to wake the world up to the emerging threat of COVID-19. Two years on, he lamented how the virus was still evolving and surging in some parts of the world.
“Two years later, more than six million people have died,” Tedros said in his latest press briefing.
“The virus continues to evolve, and we continue to face major obstacles in distributing vaccines, tests and treatments everywhere they are needed,” Tedros said.
The WHO says unequal access to COVID-19 vaccines, tests and treatments remains rampant and is prolonging the pandemic.
On vaccinations, the WHO’s latest figures show 23 countries are yet to fully immunize 10 percent of their populations, while 73 countries are yet to achieve the 40 percent coverage target set for the start of 2022.
