a pandemic is is a unique situation
which we believe that all citizens on
the planet will likely be exposed to a
virus within a defined period of time we
can say that and I said in previous
press conferences if this was influenza
we will probably have called this as a
pandemic by now but what we've seen with
this virus is that with containment
measures with robust Public Health
response the course of this epidemic or
these multiple epidemics can be
significantly altered and to to declare
a pandemic it is unhelpful to do that
when you're still trying to contain a
disease pandemic is also a word that may
be attractive at a global level to
describe an event but it's not
necessarily so if you if you're one of
the two billion people living in
countries with weaker health systems
because what's in that sense you're
accepting as I said to my colleague from
Mexico is that you now are entering a
phase of mitigation and that you're
giving up on the possibility of
containing and slowing down the virus so
pandemic has a colloquial term we've
seen the pandemic of obesity or the
pandemic of HIV or all of these words
that are used we want to move beyond
colloquial terms if we say there's a
pandemic of coronavirus we're
essentially accepting that every human
on the planet will be exposed to that
virus the data does not support that as
yet and China have clearly shown that
that's not necessarily the natural
outcome of this event if we take action
if we move quickly if we do the things
we need to do that does not need to be
the history of this event but if we
don't take action if we don't move if we
don't prepare if we don't get ready that
may be a future that we have to
experience and we have to endure so much
of the future of this epidemic is not in
the hands of the virus a lot of the
future of this epidemic is in the hands
of ourselves and those countries who've
taken control who've taken
responsibility have
really shown that a lot can be done to
stop this virus