World Health Organization Finally Calls Coronavirus a Pandemic

After weeks of exercising extreme caution in classifying the global coronavirus, the World Health Organization finally called it a “pandemic” on Wednesday. The AP reports that by upgrading the severity of the virus, “the U.N. health agency appeared to want to shock lethargic countries into pulling out all the stops.” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that “all countries can still change the course of this pandemic if [they] detect, test, treat, isolate, trace, and mobilize their people in the response.”

With the front lines of the deadly virus moving from China to Iran and Italy, he added, “We are deeply concerned by the alarming levels of spread and severity and by the alarming levels of inaction.”