The Chinese military has deployed hundreds of medics to Wuhan, the epicentre of the viral outbreak. AFP/Hector Retamal
AFP
WUHAN, China, 26 January 2020
The death toll from a virus in China has risen to 56 and the number of people infected across the country is nearing 2,000, authorities said Sunday.
Fifteen more people have died and at least 688 new cases of the coronavirus have now been confirmed, according to the National Health Commission.
Among the new deaths, 13 were in Hubei, the province at the heart of the outbreak, while Shanghai reported its first death.
At least 52 people have now died in total in Hubei, two in central Henan province, one in Heilongjiang in the northeast and one in Hebei in the north.
Hubei’s health authorities separately reported 323 new confirmed cases of the virus, which first emerged in the provincial capital, Wuhan, in late December.
Chinese authorities have so far reported 1,975 cases nationwide.
President Xi Jinping warned Saturday that China faced a “grave situation” as authorities raced to contain a respiratory illness that has caused the widespread abandonment of Lunar New Year celebrations nationwide and overwhelmed health facilities in Hubei.
The contagion remained centred on the Hubei provincial capital of Wuhan, which accounted for seven of the new deaths and 46 of the new confirmed cases, said the Hubei Health Commission.
Wuhan and more than a dozen other cities in the province have been locked down in a rapidly expanding quarantine effort marked by transport shutdowns and other restrictions on movement.
The previously unknown virus has caused global concern because of its similarity to the SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) pathogen, which killed hundreds across mainland China and Hong Kong in 2002-2003.
It also has struck at possibly the worst time for China, when hundreds of millions of people are travelling across the country or overseas to celebrate the Lunar New Year holiday, China’s most important festival.
Hundreds of military doctors have been sent to Hubei and authorities are rushing to build a pair of field hospitals to deal with the crisis as patients swamp local medical facilities.
The virus has spread nationwide in China and cases have been reported in several other countries as far away as the United States, France and Australia.
It’s not good to kick someone in the gut when they have fallen on the ground but people need to know the causes of such dreadful diseases emanating from communist China. This has to do with hygiene of food that people eat and their food habits. The Chinese have a knack of eating “everything under the sun” as someone told me. Take the example of the Yulin Dog Festival. In 2019 one hundred thousand dogs were killed in a matter of few weeks. The way they kill them is so appalling, its gut wrenching to even hear of such monstrous cruelty. The dogs are either thrown into boiling water, skinned alive, blow-torched alive or tortured mercilessly before they are slaughtered. Torturing is believed to make the meat more tasty!!! I believe only the Chinese are capable of such inhuman treatment of hapless animals. The reason why they eat dog meat in summer is their superstition that it brings “luck and good health and ward off heat”! Eating dog and cat meat are also believed to improve sexual libido. As a result there is a roaring market feeding such superstitious beliefs by eating bats, rats, snakes, civet and donkey meat. This backward and primitive culture of the Chinese is responsible for the spread of such dangerous diseases like SARS and now coronavirus which is spreading like wild fire across the world. The trade is legal and done in open space like vegetable markets with blood of animals oozing on to the ground. Every year ten million dogs are slaughtered in China. This goes to show why there is no human rights in China. In psychology, if you are cruel to animals then you will be cruel to other fellow human beings as well. While not all Chinese are cruel, their culture is rooted in cruelty. The CCP proved itself as a killer regime since it’s inception in 1949.