EXCERPT:
TEDROS: “But we give our advice based on the best science and evidence. Maybe one example is, as you remember, on January 30, we declared the highest level of emergency, global emergency, on COVID, COVID-19. Based on the international health regulation, WHO can declare the highest level of global emergency, and we did that on January 30th. During that time, as you may remember, there were only 82 cases outside China, no cases in Latin America actually, no cases in Africa, only ten cases in Europe, no cases in the rest of the world nothing. So, the world should have listened to WHO then carefully, because global emergency, the highest level of emergency, was triggered on January 30 when we only had 82 cases and no deaths in the rest of the world, and every country could have triggered all its public health measures possible. I think that suffices the importance of listening to WHO's advice. And then we advised the whole world to implement a comprehensive public health approach and we said, 'Find, test, isolate, and do contact tracing and so on.' You can check for yourselves, countries who have followed that are in a better position than others. This is fact.”