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The leader of the World Health Organisation had to be corrected by his staff after falsely claiming there were only 82 cases of coronavirus when he declared an international health emergency in January when the true figure was several thousand.

WHO general manager Tedros Adhanom said he “declared the emergency at the right time” because there were only 82 cases of coronavirus and no deaths.

Mr Adhanom was quickly corrected by his technical lead, US doctor Maria Van Kerkhove, who reminded him those figures were only cases outside of China.

In reality, in China there were 7,711 confirmed cases at this stage, 12167 suspected cases, 1370 people fighting for their lives in hospital and 170 deaths.

And those figures were flawed with China recently doubling the Wuhan death count, an admission the early numbers were incorrect.

Despite the gaff Mr Adhanom claimed his response on January 30 was as early as possible considering the data and denied he would have acted earlier in hindsight.

“Looking back I think we declared the emergency at the right time,” he said.

One week before the emergency declaration was declared Mr Adhanom knocked back concerns from several doctors who held “divergent views” about WHO’s decision not to declare an emergency.

WHO was still operating under the false assumption that COVID-19 could not be transmitted from human to human, despite the several thousand Chinese cases.

It is not clear whether Mr Adhanom made a mistake or intentionally left out Chinese figures in his briefing today.