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WHO Declares COVID-19 Outbreak Is Officially a Pandemic

posted by Jason Kottke   Mar 11, 2020

In a media briefing that’s still ongoing as I’m writing this, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the Director General of the World Health Organization, has officially characterized the COVID-19 outbreak as a pandemic. A pandemic is defined as:

An influenza pandemic is a global epidemic caused by a new influenza virus to which there is little or no pre-existing immunity in the human population. Influenza pandemics are impossible to predict; and they may be mild, or cause severe disease or death. Severe disease may occur in certain risk groups, which may correspond to those at risk of severe disease due to seasonal influenza.

Here’s a transcript of Dr. Tedros’s opening remarks from the briefing.





Progress on fighting COVID-19 can be made everywhere when the right steps are taken:

If countries detect, test, treat, isolate, trace, and mobilize their people in the response, those with a handful of cases can prevent those cases becoming clusters, and those clusters becoming community transmission.


Several countries have demonstrated that this virus can be suppressed and controlled.


But WHO also acknowledges how disruptive the pandemic can be:

We are grateful for the measures being taken in Iran, Italy and the Republic of Korea to slow the virus and control their epidemics.


All countries must strike a fine balance between protecting health, minimizing economic and social disruption, and respecting human rights.

And in closing he deflects attention from the word “pandemic”:

Let me give you some other words that matter much more, and that are much more actionable.



Public health.

Political leadership.

And most of all, people.
