Coronavirus - hospital beds
We have found a precedent for the WHO's declaration of a 'pandemic' that was widely criticized in the recent past. In 2010, Forbes.com printed an opinion piece by opinion contributor Michael Fumento. He writes about the World Health Organization's apparently strange and unethical behaviour. The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe had a problem with the way that the WHO falsely declared that there was a swine flu pandemic in 2009.

Swine flu cases and deaths 2009
© CDC, WHO
The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), a human rights watchdog, is publicly investigating the WHO's motives in declaring a pandemic. Indeed, the chairman of its influential health committee, epidemiologist Wolfgang Wodarg, has declared that the "false pandemic" is "one of the greatest medicine scandals of the century."

Even within the agency, the director of the WHO Collaborating Center for Epidemiology in Munster, Germany, Dr. Ulrich Kiel, has essentially labeled the pandemic a hoax. "We are witnessing a gigantic misallocation of resources [$18 billion so far] in terms of public health," he said.

They're right. This wasn't merely overcautiousness or simple misjudgment. The pandemic declaration and all the Klaxon-ringing since reflect sheer dishonesty motivated not by medical concerns but political ones.

Unquestionably, swine flu has proved to be vastly milder than ordinary seasonal flu. It kills at a third to a tenth the rate, according to U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates. Data from other countries like France and Japan indicate it's far tamer than that.

Indeed, judging by what we've seen in New Zealand and Australia (where the epidemics have ended), and by what we're seeing elsewhere in the world, we'll have considerably fewer flu deaths this season than normal. That's because swine flu muscles aside seasonal flu, acting as a sort of inoculation against the far deadlier strain.

Did the WHO have any indicators of this mildness when it declared the pandemic in June?
In trying to understand how the WHO could categorize something as a pandemic without regard, apparently, to the severity is revealed here:
But how could the organization declare a pandemic when its own official definition required "simultaneous epidemics worldwide with enormous numbers of deaths and illness." Severity-that is, the number of deaths-is crucial, because every year flu causes "a global spread of disease."

Easy. In May, in what it admitted was a direct response to the outbreak of swine flu the month before, WHO promulgated a new definition matched to swine flu that simply eliminated severity as a factor. You could now have a pandemic with zero deaths.