China reported its biggest single-day jump in novel coronavirus deaths on Thursday, as confirmation that three Japanese evacuated from the outbreak's
China reported its biggest single-day jump in novel coronavirus deaths on Thursday, as confirmation that three Japanese evacuated from the outbreak’s epicentre were infected deepened fears about a global contagion.
The World Health Organization, which initially downplayed the severity of a disease that has now killed 170 nationwide, warned all governments to be “on alert” as it weighed whether to declare a global health emergency.
As foreign countries evacuated their citizens from Wuhan, the locked-down city where the virus was first detected, concern over the economic impact has steadily intensified. Airlines have suspended services to China and companies from Starbucks to Tesla have shuttered stores and production lines.
Chinese authorities have taken extraordinary steps to arrest the virus’s spread, including effectively locking down more than 50 million people in Wuhan and surrounding Hubei province. But that was yet to pay dividends, with the government reporting 38 new deaths in the 24 hours to Thursday, the highest one-day total. All but one were in Hubei. The number of confirmed new cases also grew steadily to 7,711, the National Health Commission said. Another 81,000 people were under observation for possible infection.
The pathogen is believed to have been spawned in a market that sold wild game, spreading far and wide by a Lunar New Year holiday season in which hundreds of millions of Chinese travel domestically or abroad.
China’s football body meanwhile said it was postponing “all levels and all types of football matches across the country”, including the country’s top-tier Chinese Super League, in response to the outbreak. Japanese automaker Toyota, Swedish furniture giant IKEA, tech giant Foxconn, Starbucks, Tesla and McDonald’s were among major corporate giants to temporarily freeze production or close large numbers of outlets in China.
US Federal Reserve Chairman, Jerome Powell said the new coronavirus posed a fresh risk to a fragile world economy adding that the US central bank was on alert.
“There will clearly be implications at least in the near term for Chinese output and I would guess for some of their close neighbours,” Powell said.
The contagion has triggered fears in part due to its striking similarity to the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak of 2002-03, which also began in China and eventually killed nearly 800 people worldwide.
(AFP)
