Europe has now become the epicentre of a coronavirus pandemic that has claimed 5,000 lives around the world, the World Health Organisation said on Friday.

The UN agency called it a “a tragic milestone”.

More than 132,000 cases of the virus have been reported in 123 countries since it emerged in December in the central Chinese city of Wuhan, WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a virtual news conference.

“Europe has now become the epicentre of the pandemic with more reported cases and deaths than the rest of world combined apart from China,” he said in Geneva.

Tedros announced that WHO was launching a coronavirus solidarity response plan. This will allow people and organisations to contribute to help fund masks, gloves, gowns and goggles for heath workers, as well as diagnostic kits and investment in research and development, including for vaccines.

Social distancing is a “tried and tested method” to slow the spread of a virus but “not a panacea” that will stop transmission, WHO’s top emergency expert Dr Mike Ryan said.

Each sovereign country must decide on its own measures to protect its own population, he said, adding: “But we’ve also consistently said that blanket travel measures in their own right will do nothing to protect an individual state.”

Detection and isolation of infected people as well as tracing their contacts and wider testing must be part of a comprehensive strategy, Ryan said.

“As part of an overall comprehensive strategy, there is a place — particularly inside national borders — for potentially restricting movement between zones, as we’ve seen in certain places,” he said.

“But there is rarely a justification for blanket bans, unless of course the context and the risk defines that.”