The World Health Organization (WHO) on Friday said that it had raised its risk assessment relating to COVID-19 for the rest of the world to very high from high. China, where the outbreak of the novel coronavirus started, had previously been designated with a very high-risk assessment. There are now more than 83,000 cases of COVID-19 worldwide and at least 2,800 deaths. "What we see at the moment are linked epidemics of COVID-19 in several countries, but most cases can still be traced to known contacts or clusters of cases," Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO's director-general, said during a news conference on Friday. "We do not see evidence as yet that the virus is spreading freely in communities." If that were to be the case, the outbreak would be defined as a pandemic, a definition that WHO has not made.
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