The new coronavirus pandemic is clearly "accelerating", the World Health Organization warned Monday but said it was still possible to change its trajectory by going on the attack.

Iran PressEurope: "The pandemic is accelerating," WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a virtual news conference.

He said it took 67 days from the beginning of the outbreak in China in December for the virus to infect the first 100,000 people worldwide.

In comparison, it took 11 days for the second 100,000 cases and just four days for the third 100,000 cases, he said.

The number of officially recorded cases is believed to represent only a fraction of the true number of infections, with many countries only testing the most severe cases in need of hospitalization.

"We are not helpless bystanders. We can change the trajectory of this pandemic," Tedros said.

Joined by FIFA president Gianni Infantino, Tedros compared the fight against COVID-19 to football tactics.

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

Tedros and Infantino launched a joint campaign aimed at spreading the message of how to protect against infection so as to "kick out coronavirus".

According to the latest statistics, more than 368,000 people worldwide have been infected with the coronavirus, of which 16,000 have died and more than101,000 have recovered.

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