{"id":5271,"date":"2020-03-12T02:40:38","date_gmt":"2020-03-12T02:40:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zestmag.com\/online\/?p=5271"},"modified":"2020-03-12T02:40:40","modified_gmt":"2020-03-12T02:40:40","slug":"world-health-organization-declares-covid-19-a-pandemic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zestmag.com\/online\/world-health-organization-declares-covid-19-a-pandemic\/","title":{"rendered":"World Health Organization declares COVID-19 a &#8216;pandemic&#8217;"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><strong>The World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 a pandemic, as it highlighted that &#8211; as of March 11 &#8211; there are already over 118,000 cases of the coronavirus illness in over 110 countries and territories around the world, and there is sustained risk of further global spread.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cThis is not just a public health crisis, it is a crisis that will touch every sector,\u201d said Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO director-general. \u201cSo every sector and every individual must be involved in the fights.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It was just an &#8220;epidemic&#8221; before &#8211; meaning, there was an uptick in the spread of a disease within a specific community. By contrast, with the &#8220;pandemic&#8221; declaration, the WHO marks the continuing global spread of the new disease.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the US says the term is used when viruses \u201care able to infect people easily and spread from person to person in an efficient and sustained way\u201d in multiple regions. The declaration refers to the spread of a disease, rather than the severity of the illness it causes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cPandemic is not a word to use lightly or carelessly. It is a word that, if misused, can cause unreasonable fear, or unjustified acceptance that the fight is over, leading to unnecessary suffering and death,\u201d said Ghebreyesus. \u201cDescribing the situation as a pandemic does not change WHO\u2019s assessment of the threat posed by this coronavirus. It doesn\u2019t change what WHO is doing, and it doesn\u2019t change what countries should do.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>As of March 11, the total cases reached 125,865; with total deaths at 4,615.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 a pandemic, as it highlighted that &#8211; as of March 11 &#8211; there are already over 118,000 cases of the coronavirus illness in over 110 countries and territories around the world, and there is sustained risk of further global spread.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":5272,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,3],"tags":[2294,2295,20,757],"class_list":["post-5271","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-newsmakers","category-spotlight","tag-covid-19","tag-pandemic","tag-wellness","tag-world-health-organization"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zestmag.com\/online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5271","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zestmag.com\/online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zestmag.com\/online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zestmag.com\/online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zestmag.com\/online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5271"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/zestmag.com\/online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5271\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5273,"href":"https:\/\/zestmag.com\/online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5271\/revisions\/5273"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zestmag.com\/online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5272"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zestmag.com\/online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5271"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zestmag.com\/online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5271"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zestmag.com\/online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5271"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}