The Worst Global Crisis: Coronavirus on the Rise.

Byline: Professor Tang Jun

Akind of pneumonia of unknown cause detected in Wuhan, China was first reported to the WHO Country Office in China on December 31, 2019. On January 22, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared it a public health emergency of international concern and it was named as "COVID-19" on February 11. As COVID-19( Coronavirus) is sweeping all over the globe, WHO officially declared the COVID-19 outbreak a global pandemic on March 11, 2020. By dubbing COVID-19 a pandemic, the WHO is placing it in a different category than several recent deadly outbreaks, including the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Zika virus outbreak in 2016 and the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa.

There is no doubt that the COVID-19 has become an urgent international emergency that few countries can avoid. "WHO is deeply concerned by the alarming levels of the Coronavirus spread, severity and inaction, and expects to see the number of cases, deaths and affected countries climb even higher.

We have therefore assessed that COVID-19 can be characterized as a pandemic". WHO director-general Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus announced a daily press briefing at the WHO headquarters in Geneva.(Figure 1) The number of cases has risen dramatically over the past few weeks. By April 13, there are 1.81 million confirmed global cases and 119,588 deaths, with United States(557,571), Spain(166,091) and Italy(113,513) being the top worsthit countries among 209 countries and territories.

What is worse, the trend is still proliferating and there is no sign that it will slow down in the coming few weeks. (Figure 2) According to Professor Brendan Murphy, Australia's Chief Medical Officer, the real Coronavirus cases worldwide could be "five to ten times" higher than the official number. ".

We've now passed a million reported cases of COVID-19, but we believe the true number is probably five or ten times as much as that". If what he predicts is correct, the cases worldwide could have reached 10 million. Evidence begins to prove his saying is reasonable as many countries are not capable of testing due to the poor medical conditions. Bill Gates, the billionaire who founded Microsoft, said the Coronavirus is behaving like "once-in-a-century pathogen we've been worried about." in his article published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

He also pointed out COVID-19a2s current predicted fatality rate is higher than that of the 1957 influenza...