26/04/2020
- City at centre of outbreak finally able to declare itself clear of disease after months in lockdown and thousands of deaths
- Risk of infection remains, however, with some patients testing positive for coronavirus that causes disease without showing symptoms
Ferries and other public transport services resumed in Wuhan last week. Photo: Xinhua
The city of Wuhan, the initial epicentre of the coronavirus pandemic, no longer has any Covid-19 patients in hospital after the last 12 were discharged on Sunday.
Their release ended a four-month nightmare for the city, where the disease was first detected in December. The number of patients being treated for Covid-19, the disease caused by a new coronavirus, peaked on February 18 at 38,020 – nearly 10,000 of whom were in severe or critical condition.
“With the joint efforts of Wuhan and the national medical aid given to Hubei province, all cases of Covid-19 in Wuhan were cleared as of April 26,” Mi Feng, a spokesman for the National Health Commission said on Sunday afternoon.
The announcement came only one day after the city discharged the last patient who had been in a severe condition. That patient also was the last severe case in Hubei province.
The last patient discharged from Wuhan Chest Hospital, a 77-year-old man surnamed Ding, twice tested negative for Sars-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, and was released at noon on Sunday.
“I missed my family so much!” Ding told Changjing Daily.
Another unidentified patient exclaimed as he left the hospital: “The air outside is so fresh! The weather is so good today!”
Wuhan faced a long journey to bring its patient count down to zero.
The city of 11 million, the capital of Hubei province and a transport hub for central China, was put under a strict lockdown on January 23 that barred anyone from entering or exiting the city without official approval for 76 days until it was officially lifted on April 8.
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Residents were ordered to stay in their apartments as the city stopped public transport and banned private cars from city streets. As the epidemic worsened, more than 42,000 medical staff from across the country were sent to the city and to Hubei province to help ease the burden on the local health care system.
Wuhan was the hardest hit city in China, accounting for 50,333 of the 82,827 locally transmitted Covid-19 cases recorded in China. More than 4,600 died in the country from the disease.
On March 13, the city reported for the first time that there were no new suspected cases of the infection, and five days later there were no confirmed cases.
The number of discharged patients bottomed out at 39.1 per cent at the end of February, gradually climbing to 92.2 per cent by last Thursday.
“Having the patients in the hospital cleared on April 26 marks a major achievement for the city’s Covid-19 treatment,” the Wuhan Health Commission said in a statement.
However, having no severe cases in hospital does not mean all the discharged patients will require no further treatment as they may still need further care.
“Clearing all the severe cases marks a decisive victory for the battle to safeguard Wuhan,” health minister Ma Xiaowei told state broadcaster China Central Television on Saturday.
“Some patients who have other conditions are being treated in specialised hospitals. It has been properly arranged.”
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Ten patients aged between 42 and 85 who have been declared coronavirus-free are still in intensive care at the city’s Tongji Hospital where they are being treated for kidney problems and other complications arising from Covid-19. Some still need ventilators to help them breathe.
These 10 patients are under 24-hour care, with 190 nurses on four-hour rotations. There are other patients in a similar condition in two other hospitals in Wuhan, according to the Hubei Broadcasting and Television Network.
However, the discharge of the last batch of Covid-19 patients does not mean that the risk of infection is gone.
The city reported 20 new cases of people testing positive for Sars-CoV-2, the official name for the coronavirus that causes the disease, but who do not yet show symptoms.
There are 535 such carriers under medical observation. Past data shows some of these asymptomatic carriers will develop symptoms, and so will be counted as Covid-19 patients under China’s diagnosis and treatment plan.
China’s coronavirus infection curve has flattened out with about 694 imported cases of Covid-19 on top of about 800 locally transmitted ones now under treatment.
The national health commission spokesman warned that people still need to be on high alert as the virus is continuing to spread around the globe, with no sign yet of a slowdown.
“[We] must not drop our guard and loosen up. [We] must discover cases in time and deal with them quickly,” Mi said, citing the continued pressure from cases imported by people returning from overseas.
“The next step will be to implement the requirements of the central government and continue to guard against imported cases and a rebound of domestic transmitted cases.”
Source: SCMP
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18/04/2020
SHANGHAI (Reuters) – China ordered on Saturday that anyone in Wuhan working in certain service-related jobs must take a coronavirus test if they want to leave the city.
The order comes after the central city, where the coronavirus emerged late last year, lifted a 70-day lockdown that all but ended the epidemic there.
People in Wuhan work in nursing, education, security and other sectors with high exposure to the public must take a nucleic acid test before leaving, the National Health Commission said in an order.
The government of Hubei province, of which Wuhan is capital, will pay for the tests, the commission said.
Since the city relaxed its lockdown restrictions people who arrived in there before Chinese New Year, when the virus was peaking in China, are allowed to go back to their homes.
People working in other sectors aiming to leave Wuhan are encouraged to take voluntary tests before going.
Within seven days of arrival at their destinations, people who can present test results showing they do not carry the virus, as well as a clean bill of health on a health app, can go back to work.
Everyone else will have to spend 14 days in quarantine before returning to work.
Authorities have worked with the China’s tech giants to devise a colour-based health code system, retrieved via mobile app, that uses geolocation data and self-reported information to indicate one’s health status.
Wuhan will speed up its efforts to investigate asymptomatic coronavirus cases and confirm the presence of antibodies in people, which might suggest immunity, the commission said.
Wuhan, which accounts for 60% of infections in China and 84% of the death toll as of Saturday, has been testing inhabitants aggressively throughout the virus’ breakout and many companies had already been asking workers from the city to undergo tests before resuming work.
Wuhan revised up its death toll from the coronavirus by 1,290 on Friday, taking the city’s toll to 3,869, because of incorrect reporting, delays and omissions, especially in the chaotic early stages of the outbreak, authorities said.
China national death toll is 4,632 from 82,719 cases.
Source: Reuters
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15/04/2020
- Residents of nine regions, including Wuhan, Beijing and Shanghai, to be sampled using both nucleic acid and antibody tests, state media reports
- Research ‘very important as it will help us to direct our countermeasures in the future’, molecular virologist says
China is using dual testing to determine how many people have been infected with Covid-19 but recovered without showing symptoms. Photo: AP
China has begun a major survey to determine how many people might have been infected with the
coronavirus and then recovered
without ever showing symptoms, while also assessing immunity levels within different communities, state media reported.
The research will be conducted in six provinces, including Hubei which was the focus of the initial outbreak, as well as Beijing, Shanghai and Chongqing.
, the capital of Hubei and home to about 60 per cent of all infections reported in mainland China, is taking the lead in the study, which involves giving both nucleic acid and antibody tests to 11,000 of its 11 million residents, state news agency Xinhua reported on Wednesday.
Health workers collected throat swabs and blood samples from about 900 people randomly selected from eight subdistricts of the city on Tuesday, Ding Gangqiang, head of the Wuhan epidemiological survey team, was quoted as saying.
“The purpose is to learn about the immunity level in communities and provide scientific support on how we should adjust our disease control strategies,” he said.
Professor Lu Hongzhou, a specialist in infectious diseases who heads the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Centre where Covid-19 patients are being treated, said he supported the research though the collection of samples had yet to start in the city.
“We haven’t received notification from the top [to start],” he said. “The number of infections [in Shanghai] is not very big, but I think we’d better do this so as to have an idea of the scale of asymptomatic carriers.”
Professor Jin Dong-yan, a molecular virologist at the Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine at the University of Hong Kong, said that the use of both nucleic acid and antibody tests would enable scientists to determine those people who had been infected but recovered without medical aid and without showing symptoms.
The study into asymptomatic infections got under way in Wuhan in Tuesday. Photo: Simon Song
If a person tested positive in a nucleic acid test, it meant they were carrying the virus, and if positive in an antibodies test, it meant that they had contracted the virus and had recovered, he told the South China Morning Post.
“This is very important as it will help us to direct our countermeasures in the future,” Jin said.
“If we find, say 60 per cent, of the population has acquired immunity, then lockdowns will no longer be meaningful. If it turns out that there are many people with a high viral load but without symptoms, then we should be on high alert and take stricter measures.
“For people in Hubei, the tests can also save them from discrimination when they get back to work – those who prove to have developed immunity are very unlikely to get infected [again] for at least a year,” he said.
Wuhan hotel owners say they’re on the brink of going bust
to the nation’s daily infections tally at the start of April amid concerns that such people could trigger a second outbreak once the widespread lockdowns in cities like Wuhan and elsewhere were lifted.
China reported 103 new coronavirus infections on Wednesday, of which 39 were imported. Of the total, 57 people had no symptoms, including three of the imported cases.
Since the outbreak began, China has reported 82,295 cases, of which 95 per cent have recovered and been discharged from hospital.
Source: SCMP
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