The Director-General of the World Health Organisation (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus says world leaders and health officials won’t be able to defeat COVID-19 if they rely only on defensive measures such as social distancing and requiring people to stay at home.

He indicated that for the world to win we need to attack the virus with aggressive and targeted tactics.

He said the deadly virus has now spread to nearly every country on the planet hence the need to attack it aggressively.

“The pandemic is accelerating,” Tedros said. “It took 67 days from the first reported case to reach the first 100,000 cases, 11 days for the second 100,000 cases and just four days for the third 100,000 cases.”

"But we’re not prisoners to statistics. We’re not helpless bystanders. We can change the trajectory of this pandemic.”

He added: “You can’t win a football game only by defending. You have to attack as well,” Tedros said at a briefing in Geneva.

“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.

“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.”

There are more than 370,000 confirmed coronavirus cases worldwide, according to a dashboard created by Johns Hopkins University’s Whiting School of Engineering.

“Numbers matter, because they’re not just numbers. They’re people, whose lives and families have been turned upside down. But what matters most is what we do.”