Covid-19 officially a pandemic - what does that mean?

• Difference between ‘pandemic’ and ‘epidemic’ - WHO defines an epidemic as “occurrence in a community or region of cases of an illness clearly in excess of normal expectancy.” A pandemic is “an epidemic occurring worldwide, or over a very wide area, crossing international boundaries and usually affecting a large number of people.But there isn’t a fixed definition of a pandemic based on mortality or number of cases. Previously, in 2009, WHO had declared H1N1(swine flu) which infected 24% of world’s population as a pandemic.
• Experts agree that an outbreak needs to fulfil three main criteria to be called a pandemic — it has to be a new virus, it should be capable of person-to-person spread, and it should show sustained local transmission in new regions.

• Does pandemic status mean the virus is now more deadly? – WHO took long time to upgrade COVID-19 as pandemic.Even as cases spiralled in Europe, Middle East and the US, WHO directorgeneral Dr TedrosAdhanomGhebreyesus stopped short of calling coronavirus a pandemic earlier this week. Instead, he said that the “threat of a pandemic has become very real”. Two days later, on March 11, the agency declared it had made the assessment that Covid-19 can be characterised as a pandemic.Pandemic has nothing to do with severity of the illness; it’s about how many parts of the world are dealing with it.

• Can a pandemic be stopped? – Yes. This is the first pandemic caused by a coronavirus and the first ever that can actually be controlled. All countries can still change the course of this pandemic...If countries detect, test, treat, isolate, trace and mobilise their people in the response, those with a handful of cases can prevent those cases becoming clusters, and those clusters becoming community transmission. Several countries have demonstrated that this virus can be suppressed and controlled.