Читать книгу COVID-19 and Risk - Alaszewski Andy - Страница 12

On 31 December 2019, the World Health Organization (WHO) was notified by the Chinese authorities that there were cases of pneumonia of unknown origins in the city of Wuhan in Hubei Province (WHO, 2020a), By 3 January 2020, the Chinese authorities reported 44 cases of whom 11 were seriously ill and that the suspected source of the outbreak, a live-​animal food market, had been shut down (WHO, 2020a). In an update on 20 January, the WHO (2020b) reported that the Chinese authorities had identified the cause of the outbreak, a novel coronavirus initially called 2019-​nCoV (WHO, 2020b) and subsequently renamed SARS-​CoV-​2. Chinese scientists had established the genetic sequence of this virus and made it available to other countries. The virus was spreading in China and had spread to three other countries: Thailand, Japan and the Republic of Korea (WHO, 2020b). In early March, the WHO Director-​General, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, announced that the disease caused by the virus, COVID-​19 (Coronavirus disease 2019) had spread so far and so fast that it had become a global pandemic (Ghebreyesus, 2020a).