WHO Declares 'Pandemic': Will Travel and Trade Restrictions Follow?

WHO Pandemic Assessment, a Declarative Measure but Justifies High-Intensity Responses by Countries
Highest Level in 11 Years Since H1N1... Health Authorities Struggling Without Treatments or Vaccines

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO), declared a pandemic regarding the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) during a press briefing held at the WHO headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, on the 11th (local time). He stated that COVID-19 can "now be characterized as a pandemic." <이미지:연합뉴스>

[Asia Economy Reporter Choi Dae-yeol] The World Health Organization (WHO) has declared COVID-19 a pandemic, drawing attention to whether response measures by individual countries will change. Although it is purely declarative and WHO does not have the authority to enforce specific actions, this declaration provides justification for countries with clear signs of community spread to implement high-intensity measures such as movement restrictions.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus stated in a briefing on the 11th (local time) that COVID-19 is assessed as a pandemic, explaining, "WHO has been continuously evaluating the outbreak situation and is concerned about the alarming levels of spread, severity, and lack of adequate measures."

The pandemic declaration means that a new disease is spreading worldwide, but there is no specific criterion for it. However, this assessment can heighten global anxiety and may cause misunderstandings that previous national containment measures were inadequate, which has made WHO internally cautious about using this term. WHO previously declared pandemics during the 1968 Hong Kong flu and the 2009 H1N1 influenza outbreaks.

Declaring a pandemic does not immediately change WHO’s recommendations to countries. WHO’s role is to share information and provide advice or suggestions on international health issues. Director-General Tedros emphasized on this day that "the course of the pandemic can still be changed" and urged countries to respond actively, but did not issue specific measures for this reason.

However, countries generally tend to adopt WHO’s recommendations according to their situations, and since the number of cases, initially concentrated in China and South Korea, has rapidly increased sporadically worldwide including Europe and the United States, the sense of crisis has intensified, making it highly likely that stronger responses will follow. Italy, which surpassed 10,000 confirmed COVID-19 cases in less than a month, had already imposed nationwide movement restrictions even before WHO’s declaration.

Earlier, when cases surged rapidly in China at the end of January, WHO declared an international public health emergency but did not recommend travel or trade restrictions; this time, there is no such "addendum." WHO has consistently emphasized that travel and trade restrictions are not effective in responding to the COVID-19 outbreak.

What distinguishes this COVID-19 outbreak from the past H1N1 pandemic is the absence of "weapons" to fight the infectious disease, namely treatments or vaccines. In 2009, after the first H1N1 case was identified in the United States in April and cases increased, WHO issued the highest alert level about 50 days later. In South Korea, after the first confirmed case in May of the same year and increasing community transmission in August, the policy shifted to "minimizing damage," enabling frontline medical institutions to relax antiviral drug administration criteria and take proactive measures. Vaccines for immunization were also supplied shortly thereafter. Health authorities have been stockpiling various antiviral drugs used domestically and internationally for COVID-19 treatment and are reviewing the possibility of using new drugs developed as Ebola treatments, but the commercialization prospects remain uncertain.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.