Coronavirus Watch: What does pandemic mean?

The World Health Organization (WHO) has already declared COVID-19 as a pandemic.

But what does that mean exactly?

The WHO defines a pandemic as a global spread of a new disease and is most often associated with new influenza strains. Whereas an outbreak is the occurrence of disease cases in excess of what's usually expected and an epidemic is more than a normal number of disease cases in a community or region, according to WHO.

According to news site CNN, the WHO announced there are now around 118,000 cases and more than 4,000 deaths and the Coronavirus has reached every continent except Antartica.

WHO Director-General WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus "Describing the situation as a pandemic does not change WHO's assessment of the threat posed by this coronavirus. It doesn't change what WHO is doing, and it doesn't change what countries should do."

He added, “If countries detect, test, treat, isolate, trace and mobilize their people in the response, those with a handful of novel coronavirus 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."