A new coronavirus has taken a growing toll of Chinese health workers on the front line of the fight to stop it, a top official said on Friday, as authorities reported more than 5,000 new cases, including more than 120 deaths, reports Reuters.
Policymakers pledged to do more to stimulate economies hit by the virus, helping Asian stock markets edge higher, with Chinese shares headed for their first weekly gain in four. China’s National Health Commission said it had recorded 121 new deaths and 5,090 new coronavirus cases on the mainland on Thursday, taking the total number of infected to 63,851.
Some 55,748 people are being treated, while 1,380 people have died of the virus that emerged in December in Wuhan, capital of the central province of Hubei.
The latest toll takes account of some deaths that had been double counted in Hubei, the commission said. The Chinese health commission vice minister, Zeng Yixin, said 1,716 health workers had been infected and six had died as of Tuesday, with the number of infected staff rising.
“The duties of medical workers at the front are indeed extremely heavy; their working and resting circumstances are limited, the psychological pressures are great, and the risk of infection is high,” Zeng told a news conference. Chinese officials and hospitals have repeatedly spoken of a shortage of protective equipment, including face masks.
The new figures for total infections gave no sign the outbreak was nearing a peak, said Adam Kamradt-Scott, an infectious diseases expert at the Centre for International Security Studies at the University of Sydney. “While the Chinese authorities are doing their best to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, the fairly drastic measures they have implemented to date would appear to have been too little, too late,” he said.
Chinese scientists are testing two antiviral drugs and preliminary results are due in weeks, while the head of a Wuhan hospital said plasma infusions from recovered patients had shown some encouraging preliminary results.
In Singapore, which reported its biggest jump in cases to date on Thursday - up eight to 58 - authorities were scrambling to find “patient zero” - the person who carried the disease into a company meeting last month, setting off a chain of infections linked to five other countries.
A surge in China’s reported cases on Thursday reflected a decision by authorities to reclassify suspected cases as confirmed by using patients’ chest scans, and did not indicate a wider epidemic, the World Health Organization said. “This is not a sign that the outbreak is suddenly exploding,” said WHO official Simeon Bennett. “We see no significant change in the trajectory of the outbreak.”
Economists are scaling back growth expectations for the world’s second-largest economy as they assess the impact of the outbreak. China will grow at its slowest rate since the global financial crisis this quarter, according to a Reuters poll of economists who said the downturn would be short-lived if the outbreak was contained.
The U.N.’s International Civil Aviation Organization forecast global airline revenue could fall by $4 billion to $5 billion in the first quarter due to cancellations linked to the outbreak.