President Xi Jinping put the focus on containing the coronavirus in the long term, including through vaccine research, as more nations reported their first cases and deaths, while new infections in mainland China fell to their lowest level since it took emergency measures to tackle the crisis.
Xi made the remarks as the deaths attributed to Covid-19, the disease caused by the new virus strain, rose to more than 3,000, with 42 new fatalities reported in mainland China alone on Monday.
Meanwhile, the European Union’s disease control agency raised its risk level for Covid-19 from “moderate” to “moderate to high”, with the death toll from the disease now at 38 on the continent. But the EU was keen to keep people moving across borders in Europe.
“So far no member states have any indication of any internal border checks in the Schengen area,” said Ylva Johansson, EU commissioner for home affairs.
In mainland China, the National Health Commission reported 202 new infections on Monday, the lowest number of new cases since January 22, the day before emergency measures – including placing entire cities in lockdown – were first imposed in the central Chinese city of Wuhan.
The commission said 196 of the new cases were in Hubei province, and all but three had occurred in the provincial capital of Wuhan, the epicentre of the epidemic. As of Sunday, 44,462 patients had recovered from the illness.
Hong Kong recorded two new infections – a woman who had returned from the coronavirus-stricken cruise ship Diamond Princess that had been quarantined in Japan, and a 63-year-old man whose brother, 60, had previously tested positive.
Mi Feng, a spokesman for China’s National Health Commission, said the decline in new infections in cities other than Wuhan indicated the situation in the mainland had stabilised.
“The rapid rise in new infections in Wuhan has been effectively contained. The outbreak in other Hubei cities is also controlled, and the situation in other provinces is becoming more positive,” Mi said.
More than 80,000 people have been infected in mainland China since the epidemic began in December. In a sign the emergency measures were helping to limit the spread of the virus, Wuhan on Monday closed one of 16 makeshift hospitals built to cope with the crisis after its last 34 patients recovered and were discharged.
Wuhan party chief Chen Yixin expected new infections in the city to soon fall below 100 per day.
“This shows the epidemic is effectively contained. The battle in Wuhan has entered a decisive stage,” he said at a meeting on Sunday, according to the Communist Party’s political and legal affairs body.
But President Xi cautioned that it was too early to say the country had turned a corner in the virus fight. Visiting a military academy in Beijing on Monday, Xi stressed the need to step up scientific research on vaccines, drugs and testing.
“Fighting this hard battle, China should seize [control of] more core technology with its own intellectual property, make more core products to better protect people’s lives and health, and contribute more to safeguard national and strategic security,” Xi said during a visit to the Academy of Military Medical Sciences, according to state broadcaster CCTV. He also visited Tsinghua University’s medical school.
Xi said more work should go into establishing a stockpile of vaccines, and researching possible hosts of the new coronavirus strain.
China has taken extreme measures to try to contain the outbreak since January 23, including locking down millions of people in Wuhan and other cities across Hubei, shutting down transport and urging people to stay at home.
As the rate of new infections appears to be slowing in mainland China, it has spread to every continent except Antarctica – 67 countries – with more than 9,750 cases and at least 150 deaths elsewhere.
Portugal reported its first two cases of the new coronavirus on Monday – a 60-year-old man who had recently travelled to Italy, the location of Europe’s worst outbreak with more than 1,690 infections and over 30 deaths.
Two Indonesians also tested positive for the virus – the first confirmed cases in the world’s fourth most populous country and Southeast Asia’s largest economy.
Health officials in Washington state reported a second US death as a result of the coronavirus outbreak, while Australia confirmed its first cases of the virus contracted on home soil, with the infection of a woman whose brother had arrived in Australia from Iran on Saturday.
Iranian state radio, meanwhile, said Mohammad Mirmohammadi, an adviser to the nation’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had died from Covid-19. The virus has infected 1,501 people and killed 66 in Iran, making it the worst-hit country in the Middle East.
South Korea reported 599 new coronavirus infections, bringing the total number of cases to 4,335, with 26 deaths. The leader of a religious sect linked to the outbreak there apologised for the spread of the virus. “I would like to offer my sincere apology to the people on behalf of the members,” Shincheonji sect head Lee Man-hee said, bowing on his knees in Gapyeong.
Algeria confirmed two more cases, while its North African neighbour Egypt announced that another foreigner had tested positive for the deadly virus.
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Amid this spread, China has stepped up border control measures to prevent “imported cases”. Zhejiang province confirmed one such case on Monday with a patient who had arrived from Italy. Beijing confirmed two cases on Sunday, days after introducing a mandatory 14-day quarantine for anyone arriving in the capital city.
While the number and size of community outbreaks around the world continues to rise, the spread of the virus was likely to take different forms in different countries, depending on their disease control measures and health care systems, experts said.
“It’s definitely turning into, or has already turned into, a pandemic, and there’s no doubt that every country is going to be affected. How badly they are affected might differ between countries,” said Katherine Gibney, an epidemiologist at the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity at the University of Melbourne.
“It’s too early to say exactly how it’s going to play out,” she said, noting there were signs that control measures could stop the virus from infecting a significant proportion of the global population.
Infectious disease specialist Sanjaya Senanayake, of the Australian National University, said: “Now every continent except Antarctica has cases, I suspect we are going to see a lot more sustained local transmission around the world in the next few months.
“As each country goes through its epidemic, like any outbreak, there will be a peak as people get infected at a maximal rate, and then it will start dropping off as more people become immune and it becomes harder for the virus to find susceptible hosts,” he said.
“Some countries will have a quick, tall peak and the outbreak will end quicker, and there are others that might have a low peak where the outbreak rumbles on for longer,” he said.
“That will depend on the type of measures that governments put in place, such as social distancing via closing down schools and universities, and stopping mass gatherings.”
It also remained to be seen whether the spread of the virus would be affected by seasons in the northern and southern hemispheres, he said.
But while disease control measures and the severity of the outbreak would vary from country to country, measures like travel bans – which have not been recommended by the World Health Organisation – would have little impact at this point, experts said.
“As [the virus] spreads more widely it’s going to be really hard to keep adding countries to the list of travel restrictions and border closures. That’s something that will go,” Gibney said.
Senanayake agreed. “I think we are going to see a lot of transmission to the point where travel bans are pointless,” he said.
“As of December, the whole world was susceptible to this virus and it is very infectious … it is quite possible that a big proportion of the world [could be infected] – and even if only a small percentage needs hospitalisation, that would put a strain on health systems,” he said.
Additional reporting by Victor Ting, Sum Lok-kei, Jevans Nyabiage, Reuters, Associated Press and Agence France-Presse
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