According to the definition of the Royal Spanish Academy, a pandemic “is an epidemic disease that extends to many countries or that attacks almost all individuals in a locality or region .” In other sources it appears defined as the affectation of an infectious disease of humans, throughout a geographically extensive area.
The term comes from the Greek “pandemos”, which means “gathering of all the people”. The suffix pan means “everything”; and “demos”, people. Therefore, in the very etymology of the word underlies the idea or belief that it is a phenomenon that affects, or can potentially affect, everyone.
The World Health Organization (WHO) defines it as the spread of a new disease worldwide. In the past, this organization included in the concept the characteristic of significant mortality, with respect to the affected population.
Conditions for a pandemic to occur
The World Health Organization (WHO) indicates that certain conditions must be met for a pandemic to break through in a region, or throughout the world. The main one is that a new virus appears, one that has never circulated and that, therefore, there are no people who have suffered from it. This makes no one immune to it.
The second condition is that this new virus has the capacity to cause serious illness. And the third, which clearly describes the characteristic of massive contagion, that is, that the virus is capable of being transmitted, from person to person, more or less efficiently.
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