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The World Health Organization has declared the Coronavirus outbreak in China a global public health emergency.
W.H.O. also expressed confidence in China's ability to control the outbreak, and did not recommended travel restrictions to the country.
The declaration follows the first human-to-human transmission of the virus in the U.S., which was confirmed in Chicago.
The Chicago patient was the sixth confirmed in the U.S., and is the husband of the Chicago patient reported last week who had recently traveled to Wuhan, the central Chinese city where the coronavirus first emerged last month. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and state officials emphasized that the overall risk for people in the U.S. and in Illinois remains low, according to the Wall Street Journal.
“This person-to-person spread was between two very close contacts, a wife and husband,” said Ngozi Ezike, the director of the Illinois Department of Public Health. “It is not spreading in the wider community.”
Health authorities believe that the virus first emerged in December in the central Chinese city of Wuhan. So far, the virus has infected more than 7,800 people, and 170 have died, mostly in the Hubei province in China surrounding Wuhan, according to WSJ.
