"Asking people to stay at home and other physical distancing measures are an important way of slowing down the spread of the virus and buying time — but they are defensive measures," said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, head of the World Health Organization (WHO), stressing: "You can't win a football game only by defending. You have to attack as well."

"To win, we need to attack the virus with aggressive and targeted tactics — testing every suspected case, isolating and caring for every confirmed case, and tracing and quarantining every close contact."

He also warned that the pandemic is accelerating. "It took 67 days from the 1st reported case to reach the first 100K cases, 11 days for the second 100K cases and just 4 days for the third 100K cases."