In the past two weeks, the number of cases of COVID-19 outside China has increased 13-fold, and the number of affected countries has tripled. [...] T… - Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus

We now have a name for the disease and it's COVID-19.

There was a premature push to, you know, especially reduce one of the options, like the lab theory [...] I was a lab technician myself — I'm an immunologist and have worked in the lab — and lab accidents happen. It's common. I have seen it happening, and I have myself had errors. So it can happen. And checking what happened, especially in our labs, is important. And we need information direct information on what the situation of these labs was before and at the start of the pandemic. Then, if we get full information, we can exclude that. So one of the challenges, again, is, you know, a challenge of access and also transparency with regard to the hypothesis that are put. [...] One of the challenges is … access to raw data, especially the data at the start of the pandemic — the raw data was not shared, [...] And now, we have designed the second phase of the study, and we are asking, actually, China to be transparent, open, and cooperate — especially on the information, raw data that we asked for at the early days of the pandemic.

The main reason for this (global emergency) declaration (of COVID-19) is not because of what is happening in China, but because of what is happening in other countries. Our (WHO) greatest concern is the potential for the virus to spread to countries with weaker health systems.