Coronavirus is Now a Pandemic: Here's What it Means

 Coronavirus is Now a Pandemic: Here's What it Means

 Map of the spread as of March 11, 2020. // Source: Johns-Hopkins University

The World Health Organization has just declared a "pandemic" to define the situation of Covid-19.

While the epidemics caused by the new coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 are currently the cause of 120,000 cases of infections, the World Health Organization (WHO) has just declared, this March 11, 2020, at the end of day, that we officially enter the phase of a "pandemic".

Very early on, in January, WHO announced a "public health emergency of international concern". However, everyone was wondering about the possible transition to a pandemic. At the time, as you were told at the time, it was clearly too early to define the situation in this way - at the end of January there were only 4,500 people infected and 100 dead in still few countries. Today, the situation has widened as Covid-19 has spread: 120,000 infections, 4,300 deaths, and spread to 114 countries around the globe.

FROM EPIDEMIC TO PANDEMIC: A CHANGE OF SCALE

 An epidemic is declared when a disease is confined to certain specific foci. Covid-19 was initially concentrated in China, and only a few cases occurred in other countries, due to people from China or have been in contact with people from China. To move on to the pandemic, the virus must begin to actively spread in secondary countries. This is what is currently happening in Italy, which has gone into total quarantine, or even in France, Iran, South Korea.

twiter

THE PANDEMIC MATCHES THE ORDER OF SIZE, NOT GRAVITY:

 In an already very anxious context, these details are important: the "pandemic" does not come from a criterion of severity, but of diffusion. It’s a scale of magnitude, in short. This, therefore, does not change the mortality rate which remains relatively low today. In addition, health authorities have long taken this scale into account, France has, for example, launched its plan to prevent and combat the influenza pandemic (which therefore includes the notion of a pandemic). This plan was created in 2011, two years after the influenza A (H1N1) pandemic.