The World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 a pandemic, pointing to the over 118,000 cases of the corona virus illness in over 110 countries and territories around the world and the sustained risk of further global spread. In January, WHO declared the COVID-19 outbreak as a “global health emergency.
Daily Current Affairs Quiz 2020
An epidemic refers to an uptick in the spread of a disease within a specific community. By contrast, the WHO defines a pandemic as global spread of a new disease, though the specific threshold for meeting that criteria is fuzzy. The term is most often applied to new influenza strains, and the CDC says it’s used when viruses “are able to infect people easily and spread from person to person in an efficient and sustained way” in multiple regions. The declaration refers to the spread of a disease, rather than the severity of the illness it causes.
