The World Health Organization, often criticized for being too slow to declare in 2020 that a pandemic was underway, now says — two years to the day after making that declaration — that many countries are being too quick to declare it over and let down their guard.
By the time Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the agency’s director general, officially declared the spread of the coronavirus to be a pandemic in the early evening of March 11, 2020, the virus was already known to have infected more than 120,000 people in 114 countries, killing about 4,300.
Then as now, the agency, an arm of the United Nations, tended to move cautiously and methodically. It was only after weeks of near-daily media briefings, in which he called on the organization’s nearly 200 member countries to contain the virus through testing, contact tracing and isolation of those who might be infected, that Dr. Tedros made the change to calling the crisis a pandemic. He did it, he said then, to attract attention, because many countries were not taking seriously the group’s earlier declaration of a public health emergency.
It worked.
“My first comment that day was, it was about time,” Dr. Georges Benjamin, the executive director of the American Public Health Association, recalled in an interview this week….
