Iran Press/ Europe: More than 150,000 new cases of the virus were reported to the global health agency on Thursday the most in a single day so far WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a press conference in Geneva on Friday.
"Almost half of those cases were reported from the Americas, with large numbers also being reported from South Asia and the Middle East," he said.
Tedros said the world had now entered "a new and dangerous phase" where most people were fed up with being at home.
The coronavirus currently circulating in Beijing was likely "imported at some point", Michael Ryan, from the WHO, says.
Genome data published by China on Friday showed the virus shared some similarities with European strains.
But Ryan said that didn't necessarily mean it originated from Europe. "When we talk about Europe strains, we need to be careful," he said
"Establishing when that happened and how long the chain of transmission is important."
The virus was initially detected at a sprawling food market on chopping boards used to handle imported salmon.
Ryan added that the outbreak in Beijing demonstrated "just how dangerous a cluster can be in a closed environment".
Similar outbreaks had been seen in meat processing plants and religious settings around the world, so it was up to experts to work out why these "amplification events" were happening, he said.
More than 458,000 people have died as a result of the new coronavirus, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. At least 8.6 million people have been confirmed to have the coronavirus around the world and more than 4.2 million have recovered.
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