BEIJING: China's "incredibly difficult measures" in tackling the coronavirus that emerged late last year has probably prevented hundreds of thousands of cases in the country, the head of a visiting World Health Organization (WHO) delegation said, urging the rest of the world to learn the lesson of acting fast.
Bruce Aylward, speaking at a joint press briefing with officials from China's National Health Commission (NHC), said multiple data sources supported the general downward trend in the number infections being reported by the commission despite some statistical issues observed in recent weeks.
"The world is in your debt," Aylward said in Beijing, addressing the people of Wuhan. "The people of that city have gone through an extraordinary period and they're still going through it."
A renowned
Canadian doctor and top emergencies official is leading an international team of experts for the World Health Organization investigating the coronavirus outbreak on the ground in China.
Dr. Bruce Aylward shows graphics related to the coronavirus during a press conference at the WHO headquarters in Geneva on Tuesday, February 25.
Dr. Bruce Aylward shows graphics related to the coronavirus during a press conference at the WHO headquarters in Geneva on Tuesday, February 25. Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty Images
Dr. Bruce Aylward, team lead for the World Health Organization-China joint mission on coronavirus, addressed the possibility that the virus could become a pandemic at a news conference today.
“Folks, this is a rapidly escalating epidemic in different places that we’ve got to tackle super-fast to prevent a pandemic.”
Aylward and a team of 25 people visited several areas in China, including Wuhan, to see how China was addressing the virus. Aylward said
China is using basic public health tools and applying them with rigor and innovation on a scale never seen in history.
“It’s the unanimous assessment of the team that they have changed the course of this outbreak. What was a rapidly escalating outbreak has plateaued and then come down faster than one would have expected,” Aylward said, adding hundreds of thousands of people in China did not get this because of this response.
What is a pandemic? A disease outbreak is the occurrence of disease cases in excess of what's normally expected, according to WHO. An epidemic is more than a normal number cases of an illness, specific health-related behavior or other health-related events in a community or region.
A pandemic is defined as the "worldwide spread" of a new disease. The last pandemic reported was the H1N1 flu pandemic in 2009, which killed hundreds of thousand worldwide.
Although WHO has declared the outbreak a "public health emergency of international concern," the outbreak has not met the criteria needed to be described as a pandemic when it comes to its geographical spread and impact, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said during Monday.