The global coronavirus outbreak has been declared a pandemic by the World Health Organisation which expressed increasing concern about the spread of the disease and "alarming levels of inaction".
The organisation said there is a "lack of resilience" in the public health systems of some countries as it called for better tracing of people who have come into contact with those infected.
But the head of the WHO said all countries can still change the course of the pandemic if they detect, test, treat, isolate, trace and mobilise their workers in the response.
There have been more than 121,500 confirmed cases of COVID-19, the prevalent strain of coronavirus, in at least 114 nations.
More than 4,300 people have died, including over 3,000 in China, the epicentre of the outbreak.
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Outside China, there has been a 13-fold rise in the number of infections and a tripling of the countries affected in the last two weeks.
In the second worst hit country Italy, which has been put on lockdown nationwide, the
number of dead in the most severely hit region of Lombardy has risen from 468 to 617 in a day.
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https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-outbreak-declared-pandemic-by-who-11955521