Geneva-Sana
The World Health Organization (WHO) today corrected its assessment of the emerging Corona virus threat, saying it had become "high" internationally and was no longer "moderate" and acknowledged that it had made a drafting error in its previous reports.
"There was an error in the wording and we corrected it," a spokeswoman for the Geneva-based organization told AFP, adding: "This does not mean at all that we changed our assessment of the risk, but the error was inadvertently omitted."
The World Health Organization considered the risk of the virus "very high in China, high at the regional level and moderate at the international level."
The organization has not yet used the term global state of emergency except in rare epidemic situations that require a firm international response such as the H1N swine flu in 2009, the Zika virus in 2016 and Ebola, which swept across part of West Africa between 2014 and 2016 and the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2018.
And the Chinese health authorities announced earlier today that it recorded 2744 confirmed cases of pneumonia caused by the new Coronavirus, including 461 cases in critical condition, of whom 80 people died.