WHO calls emergency meeting as coronavirus spreads
Posted January 29, 2020 8:20 am.
Last Updated February 10, 2020 5:13 pm.
GENEVA (NEWS 1130) – The World Health Organization will reconvene an emergency committee on the novel coronavirus on Thursday.
The committee will advise whether or not the situation constitutes a public health emergency of international concern, despite deciding just last week that it was too early to say so.
The number of people infected by the novel coronavirus in Mainland China has now surpassed that of the SARS outbreak in the early 2000s.
China has sealed off all access to Wuhan, the centre of the outbreak, as well as a number of other cities, in an effort to slow the spread of the disease — a response that has drawn some praise from Dr. Michael J. Ryan, executive director of the WHO Health Emergencies Programme.
“The challenge is great, but the response has been massive and the Chinese government deserve huge credit for that response and for the transparency in which they have dealt with this,” he said.
As part of its efforts to help China, the WHO will also be sending a team of experts in.
“That team is still being pulled together,” Dr. Ryan said.
“This is our attempt to work with countries treating patients,” Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, head of the Outbreak Investigation Task Force at Institut Pasteur’s Center for Global Health added. “It’s very important that we collect this in a standardized way.”
Live from Geneva on the new #coronavirus outbreak https://t.co/f2fNWxSQHu
— World Health Organization (WHO) (@WHO) January 29, 2020
Meanwhile, the organization has since admitted that it “inaccurately” used the word moderate to describe the coronavirus risk. “This was a human error in preparing the report,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a Tweet. “I have repeatedly stated the high risk of the outbreak.”
WHO deeply regrets the error in this week's situation report, which inserted the word “moderate” inaccurately in the #coronavirus global risk assessment. This was a human error in preparing the report. I have repeatedly stated the high risk of the outbreak https://t.co/Qp871ObmdE
— Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (@DrTedros) January 29, 2020
About 99 per cent of the nearly 6,000 known cases of coronavirus are in China. Dr. Ryan estimated the death rate at about two per cent.
Many of the people who have been affected by the new coronavirus have experienced a mild illness, the WHO said.
Public health officials in Canada have said that while the risk of infection in this country is low, people are encouraged to do things like wash their hands and stay home when they are sick.
Editor’s note: We have changed the headline and edited this article to correctly refer to the new virus.
