GENEVA – Expressing increasing alarm about mounting infections, the World Health Organization declared Wednesday that the global coronavirus crisis is now a pandemic.
This comes as more than 120,000 people across the world have been diagnosed with the coronavirus.
[Interactive map from Johns Hopkins shows how coronavirus is spreading in real-time]
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who heads the U.N. agency, said the WHO is “deeply concerned by the alarming levels of spread and severity” of the outbreak. He also expressed concern about “the alarming levels of inaction.”
“We have, therefore, made the assessment that COVID-19 can be characterized as a pandemic," he said at a briefing in Geneva.
Virginia currently has nine “presumptively positive” cases of COVID-19. This means they are pending confirmatory testing by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
[Where are Virginia’s coronavirus cases? The latest from the health department]
“All countries can still change the course of this pandemic. If countries detect, test, treat, isolate, trace and mobilize their people in the response,” Tedros said.