Watch Live: WHO Holds Press Conference After Adding Thursday Emergency Session

Update (1111ET): After some confusion about the timing, the WHO’s Wednesday press conference has begun.

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The WHO is still apparently took worried about the fragility of global equity markets to finally acknowledge that the novel coronavirus outbreak has metastasized into a global pandemic.

A press conference that was supposed to be held Wednesday afternoon in Switzerland was postponed, and then postponed again. Now, the organization is saying it plans to reconvene its emergency committee meeting on Thursday.

The press conference hasn’t yet been cancelled. Instead, it’s been moved to 2 pm (where it will compete directly with Jerome Powell).

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mx6FzezCPXM]

Meanwhile, the WHO’s Director-General tweeted Wednesday that the organization had made an embarrassing error in its ‘situation report’ published earlier this week. Due to a “human error”, the word “moderate” was wrongly inserted in the organizations’ risk assessment of the coronavirus, basically admitting that they mistakenly played down the severity of the crisis.

WHO deeply regrets the error in this week’s situation report, which inserted the word “moderate” inaccurately in the #coronavirus global risk assessment. This was a human error in preparing the report. I have repeatedly stated the high risk of the outbreak https://t.co/Qp871ObmdE

— Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (@DrTedros) January 29, 2020

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In a second tweet, he said the Emergency Committee would have “more news” tomorrow.

.@WHO is monitoring the new #coronavirus outbreak every moment of every day. My respect and appreciation to my colleagues @WHO who are showing great commitment. We will have more news following tomorrow’s Emergency Committee meeting.

— Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (@DrTedros) January 29, 2020

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Dr. Ghebreyesus has just returned from Beijing, where he met with senior Chinese officials and praised Beijing’s response to the outbreak However, the local officials who have been set up by Beijing for scapegoating claimed yesterday that their hands were initially tied by Beijing.