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Coronavirus: Several Mexicans under observation 0:42
(CNN) - The Wuhan coronavirus outbreak is not a pandemic, World Health Organization officials said Tuesday, adding that they hope the virus transmission can be contained.
The agency recognizes that it is a challenge to contain the virus due to the global mass movement.
"We are not in a pandemic," said Dr. Sylvie Briand, director of the Department of Infectious Risk Management at the World Health Organization at a press conference on Tuesday, explaining that the virus is currently considered an epidemic with multiple locations.
"We will try to extinguish the transmission in each of these," he said, adding that the agency believes "it can be done with the containment measures currently in force."
Current control measures include early case detection, early isolation and case treatment, contact tracing and social detention measures in places where there is a risk of transmission, Briand said. These are the central elements of any response to an outbreak and may be sufficient to stop the spread of an infection.
MIRA: What are pandemics? Can they stop?
A pandemic is defined as the worldwide spread of a new disease, but it is not as simple as that. The most specific details are discussed since many factors, including population immunity and disease severity, must be taken into account.
An epidemic is more than a normal number of cases of illness, specific health-related behavior or other health-related events in a community or region. A disease outbreak is the occurrence of disease cases that exceed what is normally expected, according to the WHO.
The last pandemic reported was the H1N1 flu pandemic in 2009, which killed hundreds of thousands worldwide.
Last week, WHO declared that the new outbreak of coronavirus was an international public health emergency, which it calls "an extraordinary event" that constitutes a "public health risk of other States through the international spread of disease ”and“ potentially requires an international coordinated response ”.
Previous emergencies have included Ebola, Zika and H1N1 flu.
The new virus has infected more than 20,000 people in 26 countries and territories and killed more than 420, but most cases, currently estimated 78%, come from Hubei province in China, Briand said.
"This is the epicenter of the outbreak," he said during Tuesday's press conference.
Briand described the cases outside of Hubei as "cases of contagion": people who were primarily infected in Hubei before there was a closure there and moved to other places with the disease, causing case groups in other regions. The same can be said of the cases reported in other countries.
Briand believes that in Hubei and in places that have overflowed, "we can stop the transmission", which will prevent the situation from becoming a pandemic.
Many experts believe that we have not yet reached pandemic levels, due to the current spread of the outbreak, but also because we still do not know enough about the coronavirus.
"The virus has traveled across multiple continents, but these cases of long-range travel seem to have resulted in very focal outbreaks," Paul Digard, president of virology at the Roslin Institute at the University of Edinburgh, said in an email. "Unless / until it is proven that it has established widespread transmission chains in other countries, I think it is reasonable to continue calling it an outbreak."
coronavirus