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Beware the Waking Dragon
Staff members clean up a makeshift hospital in Wuhan, central China’s Hubei Province, March 8, 2020. The makeshift hospital converted from a sports venue was officially closed on Sunday after its last batch of cured COVID-19 patients were discharged. A full disinfection to the hospital will follow. (Xinhua/Xiao Yijiu)
Source: Xinhua
Rescue workers are still searching the rubble of the five-storey Xinjia Hotel in the southern province of Fujian.
Seventy-one people were in the building when it collapsed and dozens have been rescued, authorities say.
It is not clear what caused the collapse on Saturday evening.
Image copyright GETTY IMAGESState media say the hotel was being used as a quarantine facility monitoring people who had had close contact with coronavirus patients. It’s reported 58 of the 71 people in the building were under quarantine.
The building’s first floor had been undergoing renovation since before the Lunar New Year, the official Xinhua news agency said, adding that police had summoned the building’s owner.
The hotel reportedly opened in 2018 and had 80 guest rooms.
The city of Quanzhou has recorded 47 cases of the virus, which first emerged in the city of Wuhan, about 1,000km away.
Image copyright EPAOne woman told the Beijing News website that relatives including her sister had been under quarantine there.
“I can’t contact them, they’re not answering their phones,” she said.
“I’m under quarantine too [at another hotel] and I’m very worried, I don’t know what to do. They were healthy, they took their temperatures every day, and the tests showed that everything was normal.”
As of Friday, Fujian province had 296 confirmed cases of coronavirus. Meanwhile 10,819 people have been placed under observation because they have been in close contact with someone infected.
The number of new reported cases in China dropped on Saturday to 44, down from 99 the previous day.
The World Health Organization says more than 101,000 people worldwide have now contracted the virus. More than 80,000 of them are in China.
About 3,500 people have died – the majority in the Chinese province of Hubei where the outbreak originated.
Source: The BBC
BEIJING (Reuters) – Shanghai increased airport screening on Saturday as imported coronavirus infections from countries such as Italy and Iran emerge as the biggest source of new cases in China outside Hubei, the province where the outbreak originated.
Mainland China had 99 new confirmed cases on Friday, according to official data. Of the 25 that were outside Hubei, 24 came from outside China.
Shanghai, which had three new cases that originated from abroad on Friday, said it would step up control measures at the border, which had become “the main battlefield”.
At a news conference, Shanghai Customs officials said they city would check all passengers from seriously affected countries for the virus, among other airport measures.
Shanghai already requires passengers flying in from such countries, regardless of nationality, to be quarantined for 14 days. They will now be escorted home in vehicles provided by the government.
Tighter screening has greatly lengthened waiting times at Shanghai’s Pudong International Airport – some passengers say they have had to wait as long as seven hours.
The Shanghai government vowed on Saturday to severely punish passengers who concealed infections.
Beijing police said on Saturday they would work with other departments to prevent imported infections. They said some members of a Chinese family flying in from Italy on March 4 had failed to fill in health declarations accurately, and later tested positive for the virus.
In addition to the growing risk of imported infections, China faces a challenge in trying to get migrant workers back to work by early April.
So far, 78 million migrant workers, or 60% of those who left for the Lunar New Year holiday in January, have returned to work.
Yang Wenzhuang of the National Health Commission (NHC) said that the “risk of contagion from increased population flows and gathering is increasing … We must not relax or lower the bar for virus control”.
But new cases in mainland China continued to decline, with just 99 new cases on Friday, the lowest number the NHC started publishing nationwide figures on Jan. 20, against 143 on Thursday.
Most of these cases, which include infections of Chinese nationals who caught the virus abroad, were in the northwesterly Gansu province, among quarantined passengers who flew into the provincial capital Lanzhou from Iran between March 2 and 5.
For the second day in a row, there were no new infections in Hubei outside the provincial capital Wuhan, where new cases fell to the lowest level since Jan. 25.
The total number of confirmed cases in mainland China so far is 80,651, with 3,070 deaths, up by 28 from Thursday.
Hubei reported 28 deaths, 21 of them in Wuhan.
Source: reuters
BEIJING (Reuters) – About a quarter of China’s new confirmed cases and almost all of those outside the epidemic’s epicentre in Wuhan originated outside the country on Friday, according to official data.
Most of these cases, which include infections of Chinese nationals who caught the virus abroad, were in China’s northwestern Gansu province, among quarantined passengers who entered the provincial capital of Lanzhou on commercial flights from Iran between March 2 and March 5.
Mainland China had 99 new confirmed cases of coronavirus infections on Friday, the country’s National Health Commission (NHC) said on Saturday, down from 143 cases a day earlier and marking the lowest number since Jan. 20, when the NHC started to publish nationwide figures.
Outside of central China’s Hubei province, there were 25 new confirmed cases reported on March 6, of which 24 came from outside China.
The capital Beijing reported four new cases on Friday, of which three came from Italy, according to a notice from the Beijing health commission posted on its official Weibo account on Saturday.
There were also three cases in Shanghai that originated abroad, and one in Guangdong province on Friday, according to the National Health Commission.
The total nationwide number of cases that originated outside China reached 60 as of the end of Friday.
For the second day in a row, there were no new infections in Hubei outside of the provincial capital of Wuhan, where new cases fell to the lowest level since Jan. 25.
Special institutions like prisons, detention centres and nursing homes in Wuhan, which have seen nearly 1,800 confirmed cases as of March 5, still have potential risks in virus control and prevention, the Communist Party’s Politics and Law Commission said on Saturday.
The total number of confirmed cases in mainland China so far is 80,651.
Source: Reuters
BEIJING (Reuters) – China’s central province of Hubei, excluding the provincial capital Wuhan, has reported zero new cases of coronavirus over 24 hours for the first time in the outbreak, as authorities seek to stem imported infections in other areas.
Wuhan, the centre of the epidemic, reported 126 new confirmed cases on Thursday but there were no new infections elsewhere in the province, the National Health Commission said on Friday.
Elsewhere in China, schools in provinces reporting no new cases for a number of days started to set reopening dates.
Qinghai, a northwesterly that had reported no new infections for 29 days as of March 5, said it would stagger the start date of different schools between March 11 and March 20, according to a notice posted on an official website.
The southwesterly province of Guizhou has said its schools will start reopening from March 16.
Outside of Hubei, there were 17 new confirmed cases, bringing the total new infections in mainland China to 143 on Thursday, up from 139 cases a day earlier.
Of the 17 new cases, 16 were imported from outside of China – 11 in Gansu province, four in Beijing and one in Shanghai.
A total of 311 passengers arriving at Gansu’s provincial capital Lanzhou from Iran were quarantined, state television reported late on Thursday.
Beijing’s four new cases had come from Italy. On Friday, one of the city’s government officials described its epidemic control campaign as being at its most challenging period, adding that roughly 827,000 people who had returned to the capital from outside – most of them from extended Lunar New Year holidays – were currently undergoing home observation.
Last month, Gansu became the first province to lower its emergency response measures from level I to level III, reflecting the lack of new infections.
Tibet became the latest region to lower its emergency response level on Friday, announcing on an official website that some areas had eased to level II and others to level III.
Health authorities in Shanghai said that the city had recorded three new cases in the first 12 hours of Friday. All were Chinese nationals who had studied in Iran, state media reported. [B9N28E04N]
All three had been transferred by Shanghai customs to quarantine on March 3, a spokeswoman for the city’s health commission told a news briefing.
Despite the fresh cases in Wuhan, senior Chinese government officials expressed optimism about its situation as the city shut its second makeshift hospital on Friday afternoon, state radio reported.
“As the situation in Wuhan and Hubei improves, relevant authorities, with approvals, will make timely adjustments according to China’s Infectious Diseases Law and public health emergency regulations,” Ding Xiangyang, vice secretary general at the State Council, told a news briefing.
“When I went out in the morning, the cherry blossoms were blooming in front of my door, telling us that winter has passed and spring has come. I think the day everyone has been looking forward to is not far away,” he said.
As new cases dwindle in China, attention has turned to potential infections arriving from overseas.
Authorities in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangdong have all vowed to quarantine travellers from countries hit the hardest by the coronavirus, which Beijing identified as South Korea, Japan, Iran and Italy.
The overall accumulated number of confirmed cases in mainland China stood at 80,552 as of Thursday.
The death toll from the outbreak in mainland China was 3,042 as of the end of Thursday, up by 30 from the previous day.
Hubei reported 29 new deaths, while in Wuhan, 23 people died.
Source: Reuters
(Reuters) – When the deadly virus was first discovered in China, authorities told the people in the know to keep quiet or else. Fearing reprisal from Beijing, local officials failed to order tests to confirm outbreaks and didn’t properly warn the public as the pathogen spread death around the country.
All this happened long before China’s coronavirus outbreak, which has claimed more than 3,000 lives worldwide in less than three months. For the past 19 months, secrecy has hobbled the nation’s response to African swine fever, an epidemic that has killed millions of pigs. A Reuters examination has found that swine fever’s swift spread was made possible by China’s systemic under-reporting of outbreaks. And even today, bureaucratic secrecy and perverse policy incentives continue undermining Chinese efforts to defeat one of the worst livestock epidemics in modern history.
Beijing’s secretive early handling of the coronavirus epidemic has troubling similarities to its missteps in containing African swine fever, but with the far higher stakes of a human infection. After the coronavirus was found in December 2019 in Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province, local and national officials were slow to sound the alarm and take actions disease experts say are needed to contain deadly outbreaks. Beijing continues to gag negative news and online postings about the disease, along with criticism of the government’s response.
With swine fever, Beijing set a tone of furtiveness across government and industry by denying or downplaying the severity of a disease that the meat industry estimates has shrunk China’s 440-million-hog herd by more than half. The epidemic has taken a quarter of the world’s hogs off the market, hurt livelihoods, caused meat prices to spike globally and pushed food inflation to an eight-year high. (For a graphic on soaring China pork prices, click here)
Cover-ups across China – coupled with underfinancing of relief for devastated pig farmers and weak enforcement of restrictions on pork transport and slaughter – have enabled the spread of the livestock virus to the point where it now threatens pig farmers worldwide, according to veterinarians, industry analysts and hog producers. Since the China outbreak, African swine fever has broken out in 10 countries in Asia.
The vacuum of credible information has made it impossible for farmers, industry and government to tell how and why the disease spread so quickly, making preventive measures difficult, said Wayne Johnson, a Beijing-based veterinarian who runs Enable Ag-Tech Consulting.
“To get it under control, you have to know where it is,” Johnson said.
China’s Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs said in a statement to Reuters that it has repeatedly communicated to all regions the importance of timely and accurate reporting of African swine fever outbreaks and had zero tolerance for hiding and delaying the reporting of cases.
Interviews with farmers, industry analysts and major suppliers to China’s pork sector indicate otherwise. More than a dozen Chinese farmers told Reuters they reported disease outbreaks to local authorities that never made it into Beijing’s official statistics. Those infections are going unreported to central authorities in part because counties lack the cash to follow a separate requirement from Beijing to compensate farmers for pigs killed to control the disease.
Local officials have also avoided reporting outbreaks out of fear of the political consequences. And they have routinely refused to test pigs for the virus when mass deaths are reported, according to interviews with farmers and executives at corporate producers.
A farmer surnamed Zhao, who raises a herd in Henan province, said local officials told him as much when they resisted recording the outbreak he reported on his farm, which wiped out his herd.
“‘We haven’t had a single case of African swine fever. If I report it, we have a case,’” Zhao recalled an official telling him. The local officials could not be reached for comment and a fax seeking comment went unanswered.
When the coronavirus hit, Chinese authorities reacted with a push to reassure the public that all was well. The first reported death from the virus, also known as SARS-CoV-2, came on Jan. 9 – a 61-year-old man in Wuhan. In the following days, Chinese authorities said that the virus was under control and not widely transmissible.
The assurances came despite a lack of reliable data and testing capacity in Wuhan. Testing kits for the disease were not distributed to some of Wuhan’s hospitals until about Jan. 20, an official at the Hubei Provincial Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (Hubei CDC) told Reuters. Before then, samples had to be sent to a laboratory in Beijing for testing, a process that took three to five days to get results, according to Wuhan health authorities.
During that gap, city hospitals reduced the number of people under medical observation from 739 to 82, according to data from Wuhan health authorities compiled by Reuters, and no new cases were reported inside China.
China’s top leadership has dramatically ramped up the public-health response since its early missteps. Beijing built new hospitals in days to treat the sick and launched an unprecedented blockade of the disease epicentre on Jan. 23, first quarantining Wuhan’s 11 million residents at home, then suspending transport in all major cities of Hubei province, home to about 60 million people.
Still, the initial attempts to tightly control information left many people unaware of the risks and unable to take precautions that might have prevented infection – and the suppressing of news and commentary continues today. Wuhan authorities reprimanded eight people they accused of spreading “illegal and false” information about the disease. One of them, 34-year-old doctor Li Wenliang, later died from coronavirus, triggering an angry backlash on social media.
Some critical posts were allowed during a brief and unusual period of online openness in late January. But Beijing’s censors – the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) – have since cracked down on posts about Li and other information that authorities deem negative, according to CAC censorship orders sent to online news outlets and seen by Reuters. One CAC notice ordered online outlets to guard against “harmful information.” Another ordered them not to “push any negative story.”
The CAC did not respond to a request for comment sent by fax.
Beijing had years to prepare for African swine fever. Veterinarians have frequently warned Chinese authorities of the risks since the disease started spreading through the Caucasus region in 2007.
Pigs infected by the virus initially suffer high fever, loss of appetite and diarrhoea. Then their skin turns red as internal haemorrhaging starts and their organs swell, leading to death in as little as a week.
With no vaccine or cure available for the disease, experts recommend that infected pigs and others housed in the same barn are culled, with the carcasses either burned or buried to prevent further infection. Farms, equipment and vehicles that could be contaminated need to be thoroughly cleaned and disinfected.
The first case in China was discovered on Aug. 1, 2018, on a farm near Shenyang, in the northeastern province of Liaoning. Just two weeks later, the virus was found more than 1,000 kilometres to the south in pigs bought by the country’s top pork processor, WH Group(0288.HK), from another northeastern province, Heilongjiang. It took Beijing another two weeks to block pig exports from the whole region, and that and other transport restrictions were poorly enforced, said Johnson and other industry experts. WH Group declined to comment.
One factor behind the epidemic: Chinese consumers prefer fresh pork – straight from the slaughterhouse, rather than chilled. This means hundreds of thousands of live pigs are moved long distances every day to supply processors in major cities. That mass movement spread the disease relentlessly.
Over the first four months of the outbreak, Beijing reported swine-fever cases almost daily as the virus spread from the northeast down through central China, west into Sichuan, and to the huge province of Guangdong by year-end. Veterinarians believe the virus spread quickly because it can survive for weeks on dirty farm equipment or livestock trucks.
And yet gaps in counting and tracking the pig disease have been routine across China. Reuters found a striking absence of reported outbreaks in some of the nation’s most productive pork regions.
For instance, almost none of the reported outbreaks have come from the major hog-raising provinces of Hebei, Shandong and Henan. The three contiguous northern provinces were the source of some 20% of the 700 million pigs China slaughtered in 2017. Many came from backyard farms, which make up a large part of China’s industry and have proven fertile breeding grounds for the disease. Yet each of the three provinces has reported just a single case of African swine fever, despite widespread anecdotal reports of outbreaks there that industry sources believe killed millions of pigs.
Neither Shandong nor Henan authorities responded to requests for comment. Hebei’s department of agriculture said it had “strictly reported and verified the epidemic” and that the disease situation was currently “stable.”
Six Henan farmers told Reuters they reported outbreaks during late 2018 and the first half of 2019. In some cases, local authorities helped deal with dead pigs, they said, but never tested for the virus.
That’s what happened when Wang Shuxi, a farmer in Henan’s Gushi County, lost more than 400 pigs in March 2019. Wang said he had no doubt that his pigs had African swine fever, even though authorities never tested them – and he couldn’t test them himself, because Beijing did not permit the commercial sale of disease test kits at the time.
His pigs showed telltale symptoms of the disease.
“The whole body went red,” he said. He injected the animals with an anti-fever medication to no avail. “At the start, they didn’t eat, and even after injections, it kept returning,” he said. “If you can’t cure it, you know it’s swine fever.”
Provincial and county governments had strong incentives to avoid verifying and reporting outbreaks because of Beijing’s rules on compensating farmers, said Huang Yanzhong, specialist in health governance with the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.
Under an African swine fever contingency plan drawn up in 2015, Beijing ordered the culling of all pigs on farms where the disease is found and on every farm within a three-kilometre radius. The central government raised compensation from 800 yuan ($115) to 1,200 yuan for every pig culled in 2018. Beijing typically promised to provide between 40% and 80% of the money, depending on the province. Localities would fund the rest.
In April 2019, the national agriculture ministry said the central government had allocated 630 million yuan to cull 1.01 million pigs to contain the disease. But that money either wasn’t sufficient or regularly did not get paid out, farmers told Reuters. None of about a dozen farmers who told Reuters they tried to report outbreaks said they had received the promised 1,200 yuan for each pig.
Many got nothing. Wang, the Gushi County farmer, said that almost a year after his pigs died, he has received no recompense. Gushi County officials could not be reached for comment.
Many farmers, eager to salvage value from their herds, have resorted to sending their pigs to slaughter at the first sign of illness – thereby thrusting the virus into the human food supply. The swine fever virus does not threaten people. But its presence in meat – where it can survive for weeks – creates a cycle of infection because many backyard farmers feed pigs with restaurant scraps that include pork.
Garbage feeding caused 23 outbreaks in 2018, Huang Baoxu, deputy director of the China Animal Health and Epidemiology Center, told reporters at a briefing in November that year. His remarks were a rare instance where the central government revealed findings about the spread of the hog virus. The centre declined to comment for this story.
Farmers visiting slaughterhouses dealing in sick pigs also likely picked up the virus on their trucks or equipment, spreading it back to their farms, Johnson said.
In the southern province of Guangxi, the disease raged through the spring of 2019 and early summer, several farmers told Reuters last year. Bobai County was hit hard.
A Bobai farmer surnamed Huang said she lost almost 500 pigs during April and May. She said she tried to report the diseased pigs to the local government but was ignored. The official she spoke to by phone never came to her farm. He told Huang that her pigs could not be saved – but that they didn’t have African swine fever. His advice, she said: “hurry and sell the pigs while they could be sold.”
Huang said she sold more than 30 pigs that she believed had the virus. They looked healthy when she sold them, she said. Others sold obviously sick pigs at very low prices. “Traders took all the pigs, including the sick ones – as long as they could walk to the trucks,” she said.
Huang buried her dead pigs daily for weeks on a relative’s land. Others simply dumped their dead pigs on the roadside or in the mountains, she said. The government provided no help.
Eventually, in late May, Bobai County reported one pig dead from the disease, official statistics show.
Authorities in Guangxi did not respond to a request for comment, and officials in Bobai county’s agriculture bureau could not be reached.
Beijing’s agriculture ministry said in a statement that it had issued an August 2019 order requiring punishments in situations where localities failed to report outbreaks. The ministry said it meted out unspecified discipline to more than 600 local personnel for what it called failures to manage the disease that were uncovered in its investigations of problem areas.
The practice of processing infected hogs has persisted despite new rules from Beijing in July that required slaughterhouses to test all batches of pigs for the virus. The agriculture ministry said in January that 5% of the more than 2,000 samples taken from slaughterhouses in November tested positive for the disease.
An Australian study in September found 48% of meat products confiscated from Asian travellers arriving at its ports and airports contained the virus.
“It showed there’s an awful lot of unrevealed infection not being reported to the authorities,” said Trevor Drew, director of the Australian Animal Health Laboratory.
One such information gap is at the top of the industry – China’s large corporate pig producers. They have also been hit hard by the disease, despite taking more extensive measures than backyard farms to disinfect trucks and require workers to change clothes and shower before and after shifts.
None of China’s top publicly traded producers have publicly announced any swine fever outbreak, but executives of major hog producers acknowledged in interviews with Reuters that their herds were hit by the disease.
Thai conglomerate C.P. Pokphand(0043.HK), one of China’s leading pig producers, has had swine-fever outbreaks on farms in Liaoning, Shandong, Henan and Jiangsu provinces, Bai Shanlin, chief executive of China operations, told Reuters in a rare admission by a listed firm. Executives at three other listed companies, also among China’s top pig producers, acknowledged outbreaks at several farms but declined to be identified.
None of the outbreaks that these large companies have confirmed to Reuters were reported by Beijing, according to a Reuters review of the agriculture ministry’s data on outbreaks.
By August 2019, a year after the first case was found in China, pork prices had passed a record set back in 2016. And they were still climbing rapidly. With a crucial national celebration approaching in October – the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic – China’s top leaders took note. Pork is a staple of Chinese cuisine, and rising meat production has been among the many signature achievements in the Communist Party’s decades-long drive to bring prosperity to China.
In a video conference that month with officials from all 34 provinces and regions, Vice Premier Hu Chunhua issued a warning: Sufficient pork was vital to people’s lives and the country’s stability. He called for the urgent recovery of the herd as a key “political task.”
A raft of new production policies and incentives emerged from Beijing. And as the provinces rallied to replenish the nation’s herd, reports of African swine fever grew even more rare. Disease outbreaks reported by the agriculture ministry have tailed off since August. In January, Agriculture Minister Han Changfu said the situation has stabilized.
The government’s statistics are rife with contradictions, however. The ministry has reported 163 outbreaks of African swine fever since August 2018 and said 1.19 million pigs have been culled, a fraction of 1% of China’s total herd. Separate ministry data tracking the herd monthly show that, by September 2019, the herd had shrunk by 41% from the prior year. (For a graphic on the decline in China’s pig herd, click tmsnrt.rs/38lkOcx )
These official estimates of the decline are far too low, three major industry suppliers told Reuters.
“It’s at least 60%,” said Johan de Schepper, managing director of Dutch feed ingredients firm Agrifirm International. His assessment, based on sales to about 100 large pig producers, echoed those of others in the industry.
The virus is still killing pigs nationwide and the herd may still be shrinking, say farmers and industry suppliers. “Half of the herd was gone before this winter, and I think half of the rest will be gone by the end of the season,” said Johnson, the veterinarian, citing conversations with clients from across China.
The problem: Some areas were hit with a second wave of the disease.
Henan province is among them, farmers told Reuters. Last year, about 60% of Henan’s herd was wiped out, mainly in the densely farmed areas in the south and west of the province, analysts at Guotai Junan Securities wrote in an internal memo seen by Reuters. Recently, the memo noted, the virus has moved through east Henan, taking out another 20%.
The vicious disease ruined Zhao, the farmer in central China’s Henan province. The virus struck in October, causing high fever, internal bleeding, vomiting and diarrhoea in his pigs. Just two survived. The other 196 died in a week.
When Zhao tried to report the outbreak to the county veterinary authority, he said, officials strongly encouraged him to keep quiet. A local official reminded him of the national mandate to cull all pigs within three kilometres of an infected farm. That could spell disaster for his neighbours if Zhao spoke up.
“If it’s found to be African swine fever, people nearby will have to stop raising pigs,” Zhao recalled a local official telling him. Zhao decided against filing a report to protect his neighbours, he told Reuters on a recent visit to his farm.
Further up the political hierarchy, the deputy governor of Henan province was quoted by the provincial agriculture bureau as saying in December that Henan had been free of the disease for 14 months, after a single reported case in September 2018. The provincial government did not respond to requests for comment.
The disinformation game continues. Zhao says that when county officials came by his farm in January, they recorded that he still had 180 pigs. In fact, he said, he had just the two hogs that survived the October outbreak.
“The country is being kept in the dark,” he said.
Source: Reuters
WUHAN, March 3 (Xinhua) — Central China’s Hubei Province, the center of the outbreak of novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19), is expected to gradually shut down temporary hospitals and cut the number of hospitals designated for the disease, local authorities said Tuesday.
The province will classify areas based on different risks of infection for management as more cities have seen zero growth in newly confirmed cases, according to Tu Yuanchao, deputy head of the provincial health commission.
The province will gradually resume normal medical order while maintaining strict prevention and control measures, Tu said.
In Wuhan, the provincial capital and the epicenter of COVID-19, which is classified as high-risk, the commission has designated hospitals for treating patients in critical and severe conditions and those with emergency medical needs, Tu said.
As of Friday, Wuhan had over 5,000 spare beds in its 16 temporary hospitals, which were converted from gyms, exhibition centers and other facilities.
Hubei reported 114 newly confirmed cases of novel coronavirus infection Monday.
Source: Xinhua
An ophthalmologist who worked with whistle-blower doctor Li Wenliang on the coronavirus front line in Wuhan has also died from Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus.
Mei Zhongming, 57, contracted the virus while he was working at the Wuhan Central Hospital and died on Tuesday.
His 34-year-old colleague Li – who was silenced by police for sounding the alarm about the new virus strain – also died from the pneumonia-like illness last month, prompting an outpouring of grief and anger in China.
Mei is the third doctor from the hospital to die from Covid-19. Two days ago, Jiang Xueqing, head of thyroid and breast surgery, also died from the disease at the age of 55.
The hospital expressed condolences to Mei’s family and praised his 30 years of service in a brief announcement on social network WeChat.
Part of the Wuhan Central Hospital is located just 2km (1.2 miles) from the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market – the place the first coronavirus patients were linked to.
The hospital started treating patients who had been in close contact with the market in the middle of December, the director of its emergency department Ai Fen told China News Weekly last month.
Doctors reported the cases to management but no action was taken to protect medical staff at first, and they were warned not to talk publicly about the respiratory illness, the report said.
posted a message to a closed group of medical school classmates on WeChat on December 30, warning them about an outbreak of a mysterious viral pneumonia at his hospital.
Two days later, Wuhan police announced that eight people had been punished for “spreading rumours”. It was later reported that they were all medical staff and one of them was Li.
The young doctor fell ill on January 10, later saying that he was probably infected by an 82-year-old glaucoma patient. “The patient did not have a fever, and I didn’t wear extra protection while taking care of her,” Li wrote in his blog. “I was careless.”
Li died from the illness on February 7, sparking widespread grief and fury over Beijing’s crackdown on “online rumours”, and calls for freedom of speech.
According to emergency department director Ai, staff on the front line at Wuhan Central Hospital began wearing N95 respirator masks and other protective gear in January as the number of virus cases jumped – but before authorities confirmed the virus was being transmitted between humans on January 20.
Despite the precautions, the first medical worker at the hospital was confirmed with the virus on January 10. More than 30 others from the emergency department alone have tested positive for Covid-19 since then, Ai told China News Weekly. The department has a staff of 200.
Similarly, little information was released about Jiang’s death on Sunday. His colleague Li Hai told official newspaper People’s Daily that Jiang had been exhausted after working “non-stop” treating coronavirus patients.
WUHAN, March 1 (Xinhua) — The temporary hospital with the most beds in Wuhan, the epicenter of the novel coronavirus outbreak in central China’s Hubei Province, has discharged a total of over 1,000 people as of Sunday, according to local authorities.
The Jianghan temporary hospital, converted from Wuhan International Conference and Exhibition Center, started receiving patients from Feb. 5. It is equipped with 1,564 beds and over 1,100 staff, according to the provincial epidemic prevention and control headquarters.
The hospital has received a total of 1,830 patients, the most in temporary hospitals in Wuhan, by the end of Saturday, and a total of 1,072 patients have been discharged from the hospital as of Sunday, the headquarters said.
As of Friday, Wuhan has over 5,000 spare beds in its 16 temporary hospitals, which were converted from gyms, exhibition centers and other facilities to cope with a shortage of beds amid the coronavirus outbreak.
Source: Xinhua
Image copyright EPAThe head of the religious sect that has been at the centre of the coronavirus outbreak in South Korea has apologised to the nation for the disease’s spread.
Lee Man-hee, the leader of the Shincheonji Church of Jesus, got on his knees and bowed at a news conference.
About 60% of the country’s more than 4,000 confirmed cases are sect members.
On Monday, South Korea – the biggest hotspot outside China – reported 476 new cases, bringing the total number to 4,212. It has recorded 26 deaths.
Prosecutors have been asked to investigate Mr Lee on possible charges of gross negligence.
“Although it was not intentional, many people have been infected,” said the 88-year-old leader. “We put our utmost efforts, but were unable to prevent it all.”
Of the confirmed cases, 3,081 are from the southern city of Daegu and 73% of these cases have been linked to the Shincheonji Church near there.
In the capital Seoul, the mayor urged the city’s 10 million residents to work from home and to avoid crowded places.
Members of the fringe Christian group are believed to have infected one another and then travelled around the country, apparently undetected.
The group has been accused of keeping its members’ names secret, making it harder to track the outbreak.
But church spokesman Kim Shin-chang told the BBC they had provided a list of members, students, and buildings to authorities.
“We were worried about releasing this information because of the safety of our members,” Mr Kim said.
Mr Lee claims he is the second coming of Jesus Christ and identifies as “the promised pastor” mentioned in the Bible who will take 144,000 people to heaven with him.
The Shincheonji Church is labelled as a cult within South Korea and also in the Christian community, which results in the group often being discriminated against, persecuted or criticised, Mr Kim told the BBC.
The number of people killed worldwide by the coronavirus has exceeded 3,000, as China reported 42 more deaths. More than 90% of the total deaths are in Hubei, the Chinese province where the virus emerged late last year.
But there have also been deaths in 10 other countries, including more than 50 in Iran and more than 30 in Italy.
Worldwide, there have been almost 90,000 confirmed cases, with the numbers outside China now growing faster than inside China.
In other developments:
In the European hotspot of Italy, the number of infections doubled in 48 hours, the head of the country’s civil protection body said on Sunday.
There have been at least 34 deaths and 1,694 confirmed cases. Amazon said two of its employees in Italy have the virus and are under quarantine.
Countries including Qatar, Ecuador, Luxembourg and Ireland all confirmed their first cases over the weekend. On Monday, Ecuador reported five new cases of the disease, bringing the total number of infected patients in the country to six.
The US state of New York has also confirmed its first case. The patient is a woman in her 30s who contracted the virus during a recent trip to Iran. Two people have died in the US, both in the state of Washington.
China on Monday reported 42 more deaths, all in Hubei. There were also 202 confirmed new cases – only six of which were outside Hubei.
A total of 2,912 people have died inside China, with more than 80,000 confirmed cases of the virus.
A spokesman from China’s National Health Commission said the next stop would be to “focus on the risks brought by the resumption of work”.
China’s economy has taken a hit – with factory activity falling at a record rate.
On Monday, a man was sentenced to death by a Chinese court for fatally stabbing two officials at a virus checkpoint, news agency AFP reported.
Ma Jianguo, 23, refused to co-operate with officials – though it is not clear what he was told to do – and stabbed two checkpoint officials.
What has the WHO said?On Sunday, the World Health Organization (WHO) said the virus appears to particularly affect those over 60, and people already ill.
It urged countries to stock up on ventilators, saying “oxygen therapy is a major treatment intervention for patients with severe Covid-19”.
In the first large analysis of more than 44,000 cases from China, the death rate was 10 times higher in the very elderly compared to the middle-aged.
But most patients have only mild symptoms and the death rate appears to be between 2% and 5%, the WHO said.
By comparison, the seasonal flu has an average mortality rate of about 0.1%, but is highly infectious – with up to 400,000 people dying from it each year.
Other strains of coronavirus, such as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (Sars) and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (Mers), have much higher death rates than Covid-19.
Source: The BBC
continuously updated blog about China & India
continuously updated blog about China & India
continuously updated blog about China & India
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