WHO declares COVID-19, a pandemic

Context:

The World Health Organization (WHO) declared the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic.

About:

• A pandemic is a measure of the spread of disease.
• When a new disease spreads over a vast geographical area covering several countries and continents, and most people do not have immunity against it, the outbreak is termed a pandemic.
• There is no fixed number of cases or deaths that determine when an outbreak becomes a pandemic.
• The Ebola virus, which killed thousands in West Africa, is an epidemic as it is yet to mark its presence on other continents.
• Other outbreaks caused by coronaviruses such as MERS (2012) and SARS (2002), which spread to 27 and 26 countries respectively, were not labeled pandemics because they were eventually contained.

Outbreaks that have been declared pandemics in the past

• A major example is the Spanish flu outbreak of 1918, which killed between 20-50 million.
• Cholera pandemics have been declared multiple times between 1817 and 1975.
• In 1968, a pandemic was declared for H3N2 that caused about a million deaths.
• The last pandemic declared by the WHO was in 2009, for H1N1.

The term Public Health Emergency of International Concern is defined in the International Health Regulations (2005) of WHO as “an extraordinary event which is determined, as provided in these Regulations:

• to constitute a public health risk to other States through the international spread of disease, and
• to potentially require a coordinated international response”.