WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has called on fresh university graduates in China to learn lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic and build a healthier, safer, fairer and more resilient world, based on the foundation of equity and solidarity.

While delivering a commencement speech through video to the class of 2020 at Tsinghua University School of Economics and Management in Beijing on Sunday, he said: "My hope is that the defining crisis of our age will likewise remind all people that the best way forward – the only way forward – is together."

"COVID-19 is teaching us many lessons and chief among them is that health is not a luxury item. It's the foundation of social and economic development."

The pandemic is much more than a health crisis. It has exposed the political divisions and the social and economic inequalities of our world, Ghebreyesus said.

Millions of jobs have been lost. The global economy is headed for its sharpest contraction since the Great Depression. For all the economic, military and technological might of nations, the world has been thrown into turmoil by a microscopic microbe, he said.