A slogan that whatever the problem is the boards job counting the cost on aljazeera. Can the coronavirus pandemic be stopped the World Health Organization declares the outbreak of pandemic and donald trump finally joins other countries in taking draconian measures to stop the spread but our travel bans enough this is inside story. Hello again im jane spays what started in a single chinese city is now a pandemic so far infecting at least 120000 people in more than 100 countries World Leaders are warning the Coronavirus Crisis is going to get worse but is not on stoppable the measures to limit the spread vary from simply washing your hands to complete isolation and its not always your choice to decide how to protect yourself governments are taken drastic action to help contain the disease china and its elite of lock down entire cities hundreds of millions of people staying at home or off work football matches and other sporting events or councils or played behind closed doors the u. S. President has banned all transplanted flights from europe except the u. K. For 30 days and hes announced help for companies struggling to stay in business. We are in a critical time in the fight against the virus we made a life saving move with early action in china now we must take the same action with europe we will not delay i will never hesitate to take any necessary steps to protect the lives health and safety of the American People i will always put the well being of america 1st if we are vigilant and we can reduce the chance of infection which we will we will significantly impede the transmission of the virus well hear from the Spokes Person from the World Health Organization in just a moment but this is how the pandemic was announced. Were deeply concerned by the alarming levels of spread and severity and by the a lot of mean a level is actually. We have that for a med be our system and that could lead 19 can be kind of terrorized as a pandemic. Bunda make hes annoyed awarded to use lightly or carelessly its a word that if misused can cause and reasonable fear. For more on this were joined from the World Health Organization headquarters in geneva by tarik yasha revich thank you for joining us tarik spokesperson for the w. H. O. For weeks youve declined to use the word pandemic you are now saying pandemic now whats changed well 1st we should really try to explain what it what are the categories that youre using at a World Health Organization on january 30th or has the cleric public how to merge so if its a National Concern and this is the highest level of a large and this is the category and under international tribulations and not what we have seen in previous weeks or more countries are reporting Laboratory Confirmed cases ive covered 19 and we can see the trends that even more countries will likely be reporting and more people will be exposed to dividers and therefore director general i described a situation expand that mean however our devices did not change at any noir w. H. O. Doing not what countries should be doing and that is basically still try to contain the virus try to find people who are sick or at best them treat them you know hospitals make sure that we understand a transmission to. Change and try to do in that way to reduce or at least i slow down the transmission of the virus everywhere where it is right now well when i look at your own website it says a pandemic is a world wide spread of a new disease surely thats been going on for a long time surely what the public need is just clarity from your organization we were very clear from that from the beginning at the ready you know me generally the director general i have said that there in china you will remember when china had to deal with that dozen of thousands of cases that it was a murder scene that country and we did declare a Global Health emergency that did trigger recommendations from w. H. O. But since theyre generally weve been providing Technical Advice and we keep doing that and as as we understand a virus we try to operate and what we know and what the recent 2 countries they should be doing and if this goes from Clinical Management to terri testing to infection for National Control measures to Risk Communication to Mass Gatherings and earldoms elements of response are dead and needed and what we are really saying is that this it can be clarified to spend that make but it can be controlled we have seen that countries like china south korea singapore we just wrong basic Public Health measures and managed to have slowed down a dead net a number of newly infected people and this is something we hope well countries are now able to do because we had those 2 months to prepare and that which i was instrumental in helping countries with the weaker Health Systems to do exactly that to get to the point they can detect provide medical care for those who are sick at the same time do containment measures your boss dr ted dross the director general of the World Health Organization says hes deeply concerned by alarming levels of inaction where are those alarming levels of inaction be specific about countries. Well it is really important to stress that the for weeks now we are saying this is not something only for the ministries of health and how to workers this has to be the response that at that will be carried by death of the government of protests because the effects of the crisis as you can see in many countries is on all of the side to look at the economy look at editor at the travel and this is something that has to be at the can as an emerging yes but tara tara she even tarik you are not also tearing at your nostrils hurricane youve not answered my questions perhaps ive been watching your World Health Organization briefings ourselves weeks now that is why are you not specific about how much rest where there are problems and you keep saying that every country is doing a good job well clearly theyre not this is spreading wildly james i let you finish your sentence i hope you will do the same so that what we have been saying basically is that that its not a time for stigmatization its not a time for pointing fingers there will be times when where we will look into lessons learnt and there and then we will probably see that things could have been done better by everyone including w tour for sure but now the talent is to present everybody the time is to share experiences and share advice is to learn from countries who have been in these crises the 1st other countries to see what china has done right what south korea has done right and what that needs to be done pending on the level of pandemic your country is in its not the same thing if you have 20000 of cases or if you have just handful of people who are infected but the point is that everyone has to step up and everyone has to take this as an emergency tarik yes sure over from the World Health Organization thank you. Lets discuss this further with our panel with me in london we have david. Alexander marconis bomb david is a professor of risk and disaster reduction at University College london and mark is a medical historian and author of the pandemic century 100 years of panic hysteria and hubris welcome to you both can i start with you david because theres a bit of your biography you didnt really explain you are italian the worst place in europe is italy and you previously had a big job in lombardy which is one of the worst areas affected in italy so 1st perhaps from the people youre speaking to there what is that what is the situation on the ground that youre hearing in italy at present there is a big push to get the situation under control if that is possible the 1st question you might ask is why italy well i suppose the 2 possible reasons come to my departure from merely bad luck ive heard of those is that this is a place of encounter where many people come into the country or many go out of it and the other is that it has a very large Elderly Population who are therefore more risk than those who are not elderly generally speaking. In italy the Health System is regionalised it isnt excellent everywhere but it certainly is in the affected areas in the north the whole system is absolutely excellent i would say that currently it is functioning pretty well it is managing to cope with normal General Motors and and at the same time with the influx of covert cases i think the strategy or the country is to create a lockdown and ask the population to. Conform and to do the right thing in order to make a big push to get this under control because i see as soon the danger is the whole system getting completely overwhelmed and i have seen some reports and tell me if you believe these are accurate or or whether theyre generalized that in certain places doctors have had to decide who to give care to. Operating almost like in wartime conditions at battlefield 3 are well they have to treat hours anyway even on an average ordinary day so it is perfectly normal for adults at zeid crew to give care to it any particular moment and they would do that by working out which of the cases that take priority and that happens in any hospital accidents of Emergency Department today any time so obviously that will be intensified on the under the Current Conditions but i do believe as far as im aware theyre managing to cope pretty well and thus there is some really big change with a massive influx of cases but if that happens then i think youll see a fairly large if not a gigantic transfer of resources to try to cope with that bicep mark you quite literally wrote the book on pandemics we now have finally the World Health Organization seems to be dancing around this now are using it why is that significant in your view well i mean i mean its significant because it makes clear what has been frankly blindingly obvious for at least the last 2 weeks if not longer that this is a true global pandemic. And b. What that all that does is it alerts us to the parallels with other pandemics in history so the most recent pandemic of all this on was the 2009 swine flu. But there are also some alarming similarities with the 91821900 spanish influenza pandemic which was the largest pandemic in modern time well clearly that was very very serious swine flu in the scheme of things im a journalist who covers big stories i remember that as a huge story it was a very big story of the time i was also actually work as a journalist in that period and there was a similar panic you know on the 1st day that the n. H. S. And this country launched their sort of hotline so many people called up that it crashed so and have. Theyre a much shorter timeframe the difference was we didnt follow this over 3 months as weve been doing this been like a drip drip drip and a steady gathering of expectation and now alarm so i think the never before has a pandemic been whats in such detail in real time from the beginning david im sure as a medical man theres the medical side but theres also the public messaging side knowing what to say at the right time to avoid panic buying to avoid a massive scare well youre right actually im not already crew person my fear is emergency plan new management and that involves considerable interest in things like social media and so on it is extremely important to have messages that are clear consistent concise and repeated clear consistent concise and repeated that obviously on occasion you have to change message but you should do so in a manner that makes it clear that the situation has changed it therefore demands a new message weve had plenty of instances in the past where messages of not being clear theyve been contradictory or selfcontradictory or they simply havent kept up with developments or a dynamic situation it demands that will thirtys come up with the right information and have a strategy to deal with rumor misinformation and all the rest that can so easily be propagated by you say in the past i could say if i go to the u. S. In the past couple of weeks because President Trump has said its flu or just like the flu he said he himself is a great medical expert after just 15 cases on the 26th of february said the virus would soon drop close to 0 and that there be a vaccine in a couple of months the reaction to both of you when youre trying to get Public Health messaging out there to those sort of come comments coming from. Most powerful man in the world i guess i mean its appalling is what it is President Trump seems always to think of his own interests 1st and the rest of the world and the rest of even the us americas 2nd. There is no prospect of a vaccine in the next 6 months this is a very serious illness i dont want is trying to do all this latest talk down any panic and stop infecting the economy and stock markets but frankly were beyond that point now its far more important now to realize we need to take the short Term Economic hit and listen to the experts and try to mitigate. The worst effects of this pandemic david your view on trumps comments. As mark said hes been i think focusing on the stock market but in the meantime the actual situations just getting worse and worse well from the United States and from other countries it is very clear that we need a steady hand on the tiller and that is precisely the opposite of what were getting we have a policy that is not likely in my view to be effective of excluding certain people who are not others it rather reminds me that ive read that in the 1918 pandemic the spanish close the border with portugal they allowed they did not allow the portuguese to enter spain but they allowed Spanish Citizens to go back to repatriate to their tree but really this is an example of something so inconsistent that its really not likely to have much effect to totally terms of containing the virus they were across measures that are decisive but they are perhaps not excessive that they are well thought out and that they are based upon expert advice though i do understand that expert advice can be contradictory because not all experts agree when you have a very complex situation but nevertheless it is most certainly possible to have and to utilize expert advice to do something that would. Reduce the risk or can tell you needs or at least. Not make things worse and i think hes doing precisely the opposite to that mark some of his language he said in his speech this is the most aggressive and comprehensive effort to confront our foreign valar us in modern history well yes i mean the language is really important in a time like that because words are very highly charged so i mean frankly stigmatizing any one social group or nation for this problem is just ridiculous. The thing is that america rightly prices self and having a generally excellent Health System but theyve already got a lot of fundamental things wrong the Public Health systems do much better such as getting out testing kits the fact is that trungpa nobody in america really knows how many people might be infected because 1st of all the they sent out 40 testing kits and its only now that theyre ramping up production and i fear that also in this country its already clear that you know theyre not were not capable of testing everyone who might now be ill and britain so were not really in a position to do what south korea did very very effectively which was you know go to peoples homes take samples and chase down every contact because what people are going to realize is that there is a difference between this virus and flu this virus mainly travels and spreads within family clusters or people who have lots of social interactions ok so you do have an opportunity if you trace contacts and do proper testing of slowing those closing down those transmission chains david on the specific that seems to be the main centerpiece of the trump policy right now which is cutting all those flights from europe and ultimately not the u. K. Even though there are some countries in europe that have fewer cases newquay is that in any way affected i dont believe it will in any right here to be effective one think to another to the u. S. Is that yes it is barely. Certain forms of health care but it is Something Like number 87 in the ranking of Health Care Systems in terms of access to and quality of health care for individuals i have personal experience having lived in the u. S. For 22 years and frankly i did not find the Health System to be good at all compared to european Health Systems here is extremely poor another thing to bear in mind is that we tend to treat iraqi states as a country but it is a federation and therefore quite a bit is done at the state and local level and if you look at their budgets of preparedness in the us it is highly variable from one place to another the federal government can have an influence on that but in certain things it cannot interfere too much because state responsibilities are constitutionally state responsibilities so we can certainly encourage and it can support but a lot of the Emergency Management stuff that is done in america is to support the states and the counties and the local authorities rather than to supplant them now that could change because this could be declared the sort of National Emergency where the National Level would override the state and local level however it cannot do so very effectively because it is simply not built to do so given the constitution when you look at the countries that are affected well over 100 countries now around the world i think we know the really bad places weve been talking a moment ago about italy which is clearly the worst place in europe but where else worries you mark i mean the problem i think with the statistics is them they might well be interested in doing well because they found lots of cases i suspect well in some cases why do we have a pretty good idea of whats conscious and done well as already mentioned south korea and other say singapore had a brilliant Health System but for example a massive jump in denmark recently were the case that might be good news not bad to go with have a small. Population i mean but you asked me which country my merit about i would say russia weve had very little about whats going russia they share a huge land border with china and also they have lots of travel to russia in europe so id be worried about russia at the moment david it in terms of what should be done by countries the whole idea of social distancing lockdowns what point do you go to that level italy seems to be playing catch up some of the big European Countries behind the curve here well there is a tremendous study lemme the trouble with pandemics is that they are both a Public Health problem and the social economic problem somehow you have to balance the economy and there will be people who are suffering dreadfully because their incomes are depressed or absent as a result of the. Cessation of certain activities particularly in the hospitality and Transportation Industries for example and people are dependent on their incomes to get by so to what extent social welfare will swell up and close that gap i am not the total show but i wouldnt rely on it too much and the way things have gone so in that respect yes. Something has got to be done to make a balance between the 2 on the other hand if we dont have social distancing were likely to see the greater proliferation of the disease i suppose now the big question is for how long in other words currently for example in italy we dont really have any measures for may well there its obvious that those under intense consideration likewise in britain were thinking about the short term but we need to extend the scenario in the scenarios more of an explanation an exploration than it is a prediction to try to decide well what are we going to do in the slightly longer term or even the much longer term mark just prickly quickly to bring up the section of the population that are probably most at risk the elderly how concerned are you about old People Living on their own old people in Residential Homes for example. You know so im very concerned so i have an 88 year old mother who lives here in london not far from me and i started actually telling how to 3 weeks ago look mom you know maybe you should consider not going out to the theater you know not going on the boss and just reduce your social interactions and that is my main concern i think that we have to get this thing in perspective for the vast majority of us this is going to be a mild illness or if it has young people they may not even notice it at all but for some sex in the community such as you know the elderly it could be very very serious and this is really about what we can all do as a community to slow the spread of this virus so that when those people do get ill hospitals can cope and theyre not overwhelmed i much rather stop this than wait to get to the hospital if i could id sort of the it may be a slightly from freights paranoia but in 2003 with the heatwave there was an estimated 70008 states largely among elderly people subsequent to that he did tire of the beneficial effect of throwing attention on the problem of the elderly living alone such that they were back at the same is the extent of it so each they can be excited from heat wave surveillance and monitoring of morning to corona virus protection is currently not a power thank you very much David Alexander and mark honing his bomb here in london wise words and some good advice if you missed any of it at aljazeera dot com as ever you can catch up with the show again at facebook dot com your views and comments as ever a welcome or if twitter is your preferred social media youll find us that too details at the bottom of the screen keep watching those hands and for me and our teams in doha in london see you soon. I. From algis there is london Broadcast Center 2 special guests in conversation the state the american state steps in and save compass unprompted uninterrupted people think that racism is having. Poor black people and theres no understanding of what its to make racism is intimately reflecting on the issues of our time and i realized i was working for something that was evil and i had been a part of the creating act studios be unscripted coming soon on aljazeera with a plummeting birthrate and families moving to the cities south koreas rule schools are shutting down one no one east meets the grandmas who is saving these schools finally getting an education on aljazeera when the news breaks the word always starts with the ins of getting more police on the presentation and Economic Development when people need to be heard but top leadership world where the potential for parity of the virus weeks before the public were told it was dangerous al jazeera has teams on the ground the syrian army seems determined to defeat the rebels and continues advanced was this is a good day to bring you move Award Winning documentaries and life and use. The u. N. Fact finders accuse the Burmese Military of genocide this is a political or you think or. Do you believe the nobody is a fascist or poor i just dont have all day. We dont know the recognize that both sides have legitimate grievances against the other flatmate this is the foundation of climate back then and that is why the president does not take. Up. On aljazeera. Aljazeera. Where every. Remaining programming from International Film made plans to. Play aljazeera sets the stage for egypt at least to appear will be the life of the lives the life of the ninetys did everybody is there global expats you get it were going to let the planet go through it because were not doing obvious things open your eyes to an alternative view of the world today on aljazeera. Her. Asian stocks life further on the back of heavy losses in the u. S. And europe over threats from the coronavirus. Hello and welcome im peter told me youre watching aljazeera live from doha also coming up growing concern in the u. S. Over inadequate Testing Facilities as more than 40 people die from covert 19. English premier league team chelsea goes into self isolation after a player tests positive sporting Events Worldwide take a hit. And life under lockdown we take them