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London, Apr 7: British Prime Minister Boris Johnson was moved to the intensive care unit of a London hospital after his coronavirus symptoms worsened Monday, just a day after he was admitted for what were said to be routine tests.

Johnson was admitted to St. Thomas’ Hospital late Sunday, 10 days after he was diagnosed with COVID-19, the first major world leader to be confirmed to have the virus.

Downing Street said Johnson was conscious and did not require ventilation, but he was moved into intensive care in case he needs it later, his office said in a statement.

Britain has no official post of deputy prime minister, but Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab has been designated to take over should Johnson become incapacitated.

Hours earlier, Johnson tweeted that he was in good spirits and thanked the National Health Service for taking care of him and others with the disease.

“On the advice of my doctor, I went into hospital for some routine tests as I’m still experiencing coronavirus symptoms,″ Johnson said in the tweet. “I’m in good spirits and keeping in touch with my team, as we work together to fight this virus and keep everyone safe.″

The prime minister's spokesman said earlier Monday that Johnson had spent a comfortable night and remained in charge of government after being admitted to the hospital because his cough and fever persisted.

Johnson's spokesman, James Slack, refused to say what kind of tests Johnson was undergoing. He insisted that "the PM remains in charge of the government."

“He is receiving updates in hospital and is continuing to receive a (ministerial red) box" of files and briefing papers, Slack said.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday hoped that his British counterpart Boris Johnson, admitted to a hospital for treatment of coronavirus, finds himself in perfect health soon.

"Hang in there, Prime Minister @BorisJohnson! Hope to see you out of hospital and in perfect health very soon," the prime minister wrote on Twitter.

The 55-year-old leader had been quarantined in his Downing Street residence since being diagnosed with COVID-19 on March 26. He continued to preside at daily meetings on the outbreak until Sunday. He released several video messages during his 10 days in isolation urging Britons to stay home and observe social distancing measures to help slow the spread of the virus.

Speaking earlier at the government's daily coronavirus press briefing, Raab said Johnson was being “regularly updated," but said he had not spoken to him since Saturday.

“He's in charge, but he’ll continue to take doctors’ advice on what to do next," Raab said.

Politicians from all parties wished Johnson a quick recovery. Opposition Labour Party leader Keir Starmer tweeted: “Terribly sad news. All the country’s thoughts are with the Prime Minister and his family during this incredibly difficult time."

Johnson's fiancee, Carrie Symonds, who is pregnant, is herself recovering from coronavirus symptoms.

Johnson was admitted to the hospital as a message to the nation from Queen Elizabeth II was being broadcast Sunday evening. The 93-year-old monarch urged the public to show resolve and follow advice to stay inside.

Concerns had been growing about Johnson’s welfare ever since he posted a message Friday saying that he was feeling better, though was still feverish.

The virus causes mild to moderate symptoms in most people, but for some, especially older adults and the infirm, it can cause pneumonia and lead to death.

The government said Monday that 51,608 people had been confirmed to have the coronavirus in Britain, 5,373 of whom have died.

Derek Hill, a professor of medical imaging science at University College London, said that since COVID-19 causes difficulty breathing, one test performed on people with the disease is lung imaging with ultrasound or CT scans to see how badly they might be affected.

Hill said there are various types of breathing help, depending on the person and the difficulties.

“The reasons some people get seriously ill with COVID-19 while others have minor symptoms is not yet fully understood,″ Hill said. “But doctors managing these patients report that more men than women have serious problems, and patients who are overweight or have previous health problems are at higher risk."

Washington, May 30: The United States will end its relationship with the World Health Organization over the body’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, U.S. President Donald Trump said on Friday, accusing the U.N. agency of becoming a puppet of China.

The move to quit the Geneva-based body, which the United States formally joined in 1948, comes amid growing tensions between Washington and Beijing over the coronavirus outbreak. The virus first emerged in China’s Wuhan city late last year.

Speaking in the White House Rose Garden, Trump said Chinese officials “ignored their reporting obligations” to the WHO about the virus - that has killed hundreds of thousands of people globally - and pressured the agency to “mislead the world.”

“China has total control over the World Health Organization despite only paying $40 million per year compared to what the United States has been paying which is approximately $450 million a year,” he said.

Trump’s decision follows a pledge last week by Chinese President Xi Jinping to give $2 billion to the WHO over the next two years to help combat the coronavirus. The amount almost matches the WHO’s entire annual program budget for last year.

Trump last month halted funding for the 194-member organization, then in a May 18 letter gave the WHO 30 days to commit to reforms.

“Because they have failed to make the requested and greatly needed reforms, we will be today terminating our relationship with the World Health Organization and redirecting those funds to other worldwide and deserving urgent global public health needs,” Trump said on Friday.

It was not immediately clear when his decision would come into effect. A 1948 joint resolution of Congress on U.S. membership of the WHO said the country “reserves its right to withdraw from the organization on a one-year notice.”

The World Health Organization did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Trump’s announcement. It has previously denied Trump’s assertions that it promoted Chinese “disinformation” about the virus.

“It’s important to remember that the WHO is a platform for cooperation among countries,” said Donna McKay, executive director of Physicians for Human Rights. “Walking away from this critical institution in the midst of an historic pandemic will hurt people both in the United States and around the world.”

‘ABSOLUTELY CRITICAL’

The United States currently owes the WHO more than $200 million in assessed contributions, according to the WHO website. Washington also gives several hundred million dollars annually in voluntary funding tied to specific WHO programs such as polio eradication, HIV, hepatitis and tuberculosis.

Amesh A. Adalja, a senior scholar at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, said that in practice Trump’s decision was unlikely to change the operations of the WHO.

“From a symbolic or moral standpoint it’s the wrong type of action to be taking in the middle of a pandemic and seems to deflect responsibility for what we in the U.S. failed to do and blame the WHO,” said Adalja.

When Trump halted funding to the WHO last month, two Western diplomats said the U.S. suspension was more harmful politically to the WHO than to the agency’s current programs, which are funded for now.

The WHO is an independent international body that works with the United Nations. U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said last month that the WHO is “absolutely critical to the world’s efforts to win the war against COVID-19.”

When asked about Trump’s decision, a U.N. spokesman said: “We have consistently called for all states to support WHO.”

Trump has long scorned multilateralism as he focuses on an “America First” agenda. Since taking office, he has quit the U.N. Human Rights Council, the U.N. cultural agency, a global accord to tackle climate change and the Iran nuclear deal. He has also cut funding for the U.N. population fund and the U.N. agency that aids Palestinian refugees.

“The WHO is the world’s early warning system for infectious diseases,” said U.S. Representative Nita Lowey, a Democrat who chairs the House Committee on Appropriations. “Now, during a global pandemic that has cost over 100,000 American lives, is not the time to put the country further at risk.”

Feb 26: China’s massive travel restrictions, house-to-house checks, huge isolation wards and lockdowns of entire cities bought the world valuable time to prepare for the global spread of the new virus.

But with troubling outbreaks now emerging in Italy, South Korea and Iran, and U.S. health officials warning Tuesday it’s inevitable it will spread more widely in America, the question is: Did the world use that time wisely and is it ready for a potential pandemic?

“It’s not so much a question of if this will happen anymore, but rather more a question of exactly when this will happen — and how many people in this country will have severe illness,” said Dr. Nancy Messonnier of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Some countries are putting price caps on face masks to combat price gouging, while others are using loudspeakers on trucks to keep residents informed. In the United States and many other nations, public health officials are turning to guidelines written for pandemic flu and discussing the possibility of school closures, telecommuting and canceling events.

Countries could be doing even more: training hundreds of workers to trace the virus’ spread from person to person and planning to commandeer entire hospital wards or even entire hospitals, said Dr. Bruce Aylward, the World Health Organization’s envoy to China, briefing reporters Tuesday about lessons learned by the recently returned team of international scientists he led.

“Time is everything in this disease,” Aylward said. “Days make a difference with a disease like this.”

The U.S. National Institutes of Health’s infectious disease chief, Dr. Anthony Fauci, said the world is “teetering very, very close” to a pandemic. He credits China’s response for giving other nations some breathing room.

China locked down tens of millions of its citizens and other nations imposed travel restrictions, reducing the number of people who needed health checks or quarantines outside the Asian country.

It “gave us time to really brush off our pandemic preparedness plans and get ready for the kinds of things we have to do,” Fauci said. “And we’ve actually been quite successful because the travel-related cases, we’ve been able to identify, to isolate” and to track down those they came in contact with.

With no vaccine or medicine available yet, preparations are focused on what’s called “social distancing” — limiting opportunities for people to gather and spread the virus.

That played out in Italy this week. With cases climbing, authorities cut short the popular Venice Carnival and closed down Milan’s La Scala opera house. In Japan, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe called on companies to allow employees to work from home, while the Tokyo Marathon has been restricted to elite runners and other public events have been canceled.

Is the rest of the world ready?

In Africa, three-quarters of countries have a flu pandemic plan, but most are outdated, according to authors of a modeling study published last week in The Lancet medical journal. The slightly better news is that the African nations most connected to China by air travel — Egypt, Algeria and South Africa — also have the most prepared health systems on the continent.

Elsewhere, Thailand said it would establish special clinics to examine people with flu-like symptoms to detect infections early. Sri Lanka and Laos imposed price ceilings for face masks, while India restricted the export of personal protective equipment.

India’s health ministry has been framing step-by-step instructions to deal with sustained transmissions that will be circulated to the 250,000 village councils that are the most basic unit of the country’s sprawling administration.

Vietnam is using music videos on social media to reach the public. In Malaysia, loudspeakers on trucks blare information through the streets.

In Europe, portable pods set up at United Kingdom hospitals will be used to assess people suspected of infection while keeping them apart from others. France developed a quick test for the virus and has shared it with poorer nations. German authorities are stressing “sneezing etiquette” and Russia is screening people at airports, railway stations and those riding public transportation.

In the U.S., hospitals and emergency workers for years have practiced for a possible deadly, fast-spreading flu. Those drills helped the first hospitals to treat U.S. patients suffering from COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus.

Other hospitals are paying attention. The CDC has been talking to the American Hospital Association, which in turn communicates coronavirus news daily to its nearly 5,000 member hospitals. Hospitals are reviewing infection control measures, considering using telemedicine to keep potentially infectious patients from making unnecessary trips to the hospital and conserving dwindling supplies of masks and gloves.

What’s more, the CDC has held 17 different calls reaching more than 11,000 companies and organizations, including stadiums, universities, faith leaders, retailers and large corporations. U.S. health authorities are talking to city, county and state health departments about being ready to cancel mass gathering events, close schools and take other steps.

The CDC’s Messonnier said Tuesday she had contacted her children’s school district to ask about plans for using internet-based education should schools need to close temporarily, as some did in 2009 during an outbreak of H1N1 flu. She encouraged American parents to do the same, and to ask their employers whether they’ll be able to work from home.

“We want to make sure the American public is prepared,” Messonnier said.

How prepared are U.S. hospitals?

“It depends on caseload and location. I would suspect most hospitals are prepared to handle one to two cases, but if there is ongoing local transmission with many cases, most are likely not prepared just yet for a surge of patients and the ‘worried well,’” Dr. Jennifer Lighter, a pediatric infectious diseases specialist at NYU Langone in New York, said in an email.

In the U.S., a vaccine candidate is inching closer to first-step safety studies in people, as Moderna Inc. has delivered test doses to Fauci’s NIH institute. Some other companies say they have candidates that could begin testing in a few months. Still, even if those first safety studies show no red flags, specialists believe it would take at least a year to have something ready for widespread use. That’s longer than it took in 2009, during the H1N1 flu pandemic — because that time around, scientists only had to adjust regular flu vaccines, not start from scratch.

The head of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said the U.N. health agency’s team in China found the fatality rate between 2% and 4% in the hard-hit city of Wuhan, the virus’ epicenter, and 0.7% elsewhere.

The world is “simply not ready,” said the WHO’s Aylward. “It can get ready very fast, but the big shift has to be in the mindset.”

Aylward advised other countries to do “really practical things” now to get ready.

Among them: Do you have hundreds of workers lined up and trained to trace the contacts of infected patients, or will you be training them after a cluster pops up?

Can you take over entire hospital wards, or even entire hospitals, to isolate patients?

Are hospitals buying ventilators and checking oxygen supplies?

Countries must improve testing capacity — and instructions so health workers know which travelers should be tested as the number of affected countries rises, said Johns Hopkins University emergency response specialist Lauren Sauer. She pointed to how Canada diagnosed the first traveler from Iran arriving there with COVID-19, before many other countries even considered adding Iran to the at-risk list.

If the disease does spread globally, everyone is likely to feel it, said Nancy Foster, a vice president of the American Hospital Association. Even those who aren’t ill may need to help friends and family in isolation or have their own health appointments delayed.

“There will be a lot of people affected even if they never become ill themselves,” she said.