WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said today that it considers Covid-19 a pandemic.

"We are deeply concerned about both the spread and the severity of the epidemic and the alarming indifference of many parties. Therefore, we assess that Covid-19 could be considered a pandemic. ", Tedros said during a press conference in Switzerland.

Tedros said the number of cases outside mainland China has increased 13-fold in the past two weeks. "We have never seen a pandemic caused by a corona virus strain," he said.

Mike Ryan, head of the WHO's emergency response program, said during a press conference that the organization's use of the word "pandemic" to describe Covid-19 did not change their way of coping. He added that the situation in Iran is "very serious" and WHO hopes it will monitor the situation and take better care of its patients.

The WHO declared a global emergency state on January 30 when there were fewer than 100 cases of nCoV outside China. Currently outbreaks appear in 120 countries and territories. More than 122,000 people were infected, more than 4,300 died and more than 67,000 recovered. In particular, mainland China recorded nearly 81,000 cases, more than 3,100 deaths and nearly 62,000 people recovered.

In fact, WHO no longer has a category for a pandemic, except for the flu. WHO officials have signaled for weeks that they can use the word "pandemic" as a descriptive term but emphasize that it has no legal meaning. Covid-19 is not the flu.

WHO has declared the 2009 swine flu pandemic a "pandemic", that is at risk of serious global impact. However, the epidemic was later deemed not too serious, prompting WHO to criticize it for exaggerating the problem. A WHO spokesman on February 24 said it had "no longer used the old severity classification system that some people may be familiar with since 2009".

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