02/11/2020 - 12:30
- Clarín.com
- World
The World Health Organization (WHO) announced Tuesday that the disease caused by the new Wuhan coronavirus will officially receive the name "Covid-19" , as decided on the first day of meeting of 300 experts on this epidemic in Geneva .
The WHO decided to use a name that "can pronounce itself and does not refer to a specific geographical location, an animal or a group of people" to avoid stigmatization, the agency's general director, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said at a press conference in announcing this decision .
The name is born from an acronym in English from the expression "corona virus disease" and will be a standard for eventual outbreaks of coronavirus in the future, said Tedros.
"We now have a name for the disease and this is Covid-19," he announced. And he explained that "co" means "crown", "vi" for "virus" and "d" for "disease" (disease).
Within the framework of this summit, WHO also stressed that there is "a realistic possibility of stopping" the new virus.
After unleashing in the Chinese city of Wuhan, in a market where wild animals were sold for human consumption, the outbreak of coronavirus already claimed the lives of 1,016 people in China, leading to one hundred deaths in one day.
The first death due to the 2019-nCoV virus, which appeared in December in the Chinese city of Wuhan (center), was announced on January 11.
However, and as happened last week, the daily number of people infected (2,478 in the last 24 hours) decreased in relation to Monday. In total since the beginning of the outbreak more than 42,000 infected are counted.
"With 99% of cases in China, (the epidemic) continues to be a real emergency for this country, but it is also a very serious threat to the rest of the world," the WTO director general warned at the opening of The summit in Geneva.
The head of WHO asked all countries to show "solidarity" by sharing the information they have because it will be essential to advance scientific research.
On Thursday in Brussels, European Health Ministers will also meet to try to coordinate a common strategy to alleviate the epidemic. And WHO has sent an expert mission to China, led by Bruce Aylward, an expert in the fight against Ebola.
Outside of mainland China, the virus has so far killed two people, one in the Philippines and one in Hong Kong, but more than 400 cases of contamination were confirmed in 30 countries and territories.
WHO is especially concerned about the case of a Briton who had never been to China and was contaminated by the new coronavirus in Singapore. He then transmitted it to several compatriots during a stay in France before being diagnosed in the United Kingdom.
In total, the man accidentally contaminated at least 11 people : five of them hospitalized in France, another five in the United Kingdom and a 46-year-old man hospitalized on the Spanish island of Mallorca, where he resides.
This Tuesday it was announced that this Briton, already nicknamed the "superpropagador", was "totally cured".
Until now, the majority of positive cases abroad were people returning from Wuhan, the epicenter of the epidemic.
AFP AND EFE