It’s quite odd, that, despite the scale of the ongoing coronavirus outbreak, the World Health Organization is unwilling to label it a ‘pandemic’, and a group of scientists are faulting them for this reluctance.
“I think it’s pretty clear we’re in a pandemic and I don’t know why WHO is resisting that,” said the director for the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (U of Minnesota), Michael Osterholm.
But what really is a pandemic? From WHO, it is a “worldwide spread of a new disease.”
The Center for Disease Control and Prevention defines a pandemic as an epidemic that has spread over several countries or continents, usually affecting a large number of people.
The WHO’s situation report, as of 08 March 2020, confirms that more than 100 countries and territories have lab-confirmed cases of COVID-19, the new virus causing this disease.
Globally, there are 105,586 cases, with 3,100 deaths in China, where the virus was first detected in Wuhan city, Hubei province, and 484 deaths outside China, where new cases keep popping up. And what’s WHO’s risk assessment for the whole world?
Very High.
We are at a point in which COVID-19 cases have been reported in all continents except for Antarctica; cases have begun emerging in Africa, which, like other regions of the world, is reporting both imported cases and incidences resulting from local transmission.
Here in the more disadvantaged corners of the world, a severe outbreak would truly be disastrous; there are no resources to enforce province-wide quarantines, as China has managed to do around Wuhan, placing 11 million people in lockdown, or as Italy has recently announced, quarantining some 15 million people in the north, the epicenter of their outbreak.
Health services tend to be inadequate, and the wealthy will often fly out for the best medical attention; a common joke in Kenya is that the only medical facility the wealthy trust in Kenya is the Lee Funeral Home.
The continent is poorly prepared, and I think if the WHO declared the ongoing covid-19 cases a pandemic, It would inject a greater sense of urgency in being prepared for it.
Furthermore, such a declaration could probably spur the release of funds from the Pandemic Emergency Financing Facility; this World Bank initiative pumped at least $50 million to tackle the current Ebola outbreak in D.R. Congo.
In the context of covid-19, the initiative would probably help in getting all nations get proper testing facilities to confirm suspect cases; currently 33 of 47 sub-Saharan nations have testing facilities, meaning if cases erupt in the other 14 nations, local transmission will have taken root before the tests are confirmed.
There’s also the matter of adequate personal protective equipment; WHO has acknowledged a looming shortage, one that will severely frontline health workers. With most of the global supply coming from China, whose factories are not working at full capacity, if at all, , and the general public making a run for the available masks, respirators, face shields and whatnot, it is health worker who will be left most exposed. Averting such a situation would require a significant mobilization of funds.
Besides, WHO declaring it a pandemic would confirm what we are already seeing- panic buying in anticipation of regional quarantines and crashes in the stock market.
Declaring a panic wouldn’t set the world on fire after all; the 2009 H1N1 outbreak was declared a pandemic two months after it was first detected, and it remained classified as such until 2010.
Declaring it so would compel everyone to address it with the urgency and seriousness it deserves.
