New York Daily News
Mar 13, 2020 4: 09 PM
World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus attends a daily press briefing on COVID-19 virus at the WHO headquarters on March 6, 2020, in Geneva.(FABRICE COFFRINI/AFP via Getty Images)
As the deadly coronavirus outbreak continues to spread through Italy and neighboring countries, the World Health Organization now considers Europe to be the epicenter of the pandemic.
“With more reported cases and deaths than the rest of the world combined, apart from China, more cases are now being reported every day than were reported in China at the height of its epidemic,” the agency’s director-general, Tedros Ghebreyesus, told reporters at a news conference Friday.
Italian authorities confirmed 250 new coronavirus deaths on Friday, a daily record for the country and the continent, as well as more than 2,000 new cases.
In China, meanwhile, only 11 new cases and seven deaths were reported Friday, according to the WHO’s official data. Just a few weeks ago, China was reporting thousands of new cases each day.
The viral infection, which is believed to have emerged in the Chinese city of Wuhan, triggered numerous drastic measures in that country, with dozens of millions of people in Wuhan’s Hubei province and surrounding regions going into a lockdown at the height of the outbreak.
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In recent weeks, the virus made its way into every continent besides Antarctica, with Italy, Iran and the U.S. becoming some of the main hot spots outside Asia. The number of cases in France, Germany and Spain are also in the thousands.
Ghebreyesus said every country in the world should take “a comprehensive approach” that includes testing, isolating, social distancing and whatever else is needed to contain the spread of th