The United States on Monday eased its warning against travel to China, acknowledging that the nation had made progress against Covid-19 despite frequent US criticism of its pandemic role. The State Department still urges Americans to reconsider travel to China, but it upgraded its advice from a blanket warning not to go to the country. The People’s Republic of China “has resumed most business operations (including day cares and schools),” the State Department said. “Other improved conditions have been reported within the PRC,” it said. The State Department separately still cautioned US citizens about the risk of arbitrary arrest in China, including in Hong Kong as Beijing enforces a tough new security law. The updated travel advice comes a week after China declared victory over the virus a...
Wuhan, China, once the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic, has returned to a sense of normalcy. This past weekend, in fact, thousands of people turned out for an electronic music concert. The event took place at the Wuhan Maya Beach Water Park, an open-air venue with a capacity of around 15,000. Though organizers restricted capacity to 50%, the event still drew thousands, with a vast majority choosing not to wear a mask or practice social distancing. A number of attendees even watched the concert from inflatable rubber tubes floating in a giant pool. While such scenes are unthinkable in the era of coronavirus, Wuhan has reported no new cases of the virus since mid-May and has largely lifted the stringent lockdown restrictions in place since January. Wuhan, China — once the glo...
China on Saturday reported zero new coronavirus infections for the first time since it started reporting data in January, a day after Communist Party leaders celebrated “major achievements” in the virus fight. The virus first emerged in the central Chinese city of Wuhan late last year, but cases have dwindled dramatically from the peak in mid-February as the country appears to have brought the virus largely under control. The official death toll in the country of 1.4 billion people stands at 4,634, well below the number of fatalities in much smaller countries. However, doubt has been cast on the reliability of China’s numbers and the United States has led the charge in questioning how much information Beijing has shared with the international community. The milestone comes a day after the ...
China has acknowledged it destroyed early samples of COVID-19, confirming a claim put forward by U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo late last month. On Friday, Liu Dengfeng, a supervisor with China’s National Health Commission, admitted that ‘the Chinese government issued an order on January 3 to dispose of coronavirus samples’ at unauthorized laboratories, according to Newsweek. But Liu denied that the samples were destroyed as part of a cover-up, insisting that they were disposed of so as to ‘prevent risk to laboratory biological safety and prevent secondary disasters caused by unidentified pathogens.’ He stated that the labs were ‘unauthorized’ to handle such samples, and they had to be terminated in order to comply with Chinese public health laws. Liu did not specify how many labs des...
The epicentre of the new coronavirus outbreak in China, Wuhan says over 3 million residents have been tested for the pathogen since April. The State Media stated that tests will continue and this time will be focused on the rest of its 11 million population. The official Xinhua News Agency reported that the test, upon completion, is to help give the authorities a clear indication of the number of asymptomatic cases as businesses and schools reopen. Priority will be given to residents who have not been tested before, people living in residential compounds that had previous cases of infection, as well as old or densely populated estates, Xinhua said, citing a Wuhan government meeting. Fears of a second wave of infections flared over the weekend after Wuhan reported a cluster of infections, t...
The new coronavirus may never go away and populations around the world will have to learn to live with it, the World Health Organization warned Wednesday. As some countries around the world begin gradually easing lockdown restrictions imposed in a bid to stop the novel coronavirus from spreading, the WHO said it may never be wiped out entirely. The virus first emerged in Wuhan in China late last year and has since infected more than 4.2 million people and killed nearly 300,000 worldwide. “We have a new virus entering the human population for the first time and therefore it is very hard to predict when we will prevail over it,” said Michael Ryan, the WHO’s emergencies director. “This virus may become just another endemic virus in our communities and this virus may never go away,” he told a ...
China on Sunday reported the first case of coronavirus in over a month in Wuhan, the city where the outbreak first started in December last year. China’s National Health Commission also reported the first double-digit increase in countrywide cases in nearly 10 days, saying 14 new infections had been confirmed. Two of the cases were imported into the country from overseas, the commission said. The coronavirus first emerged in China’s Wuhan, a major industrial and transport city in central China, in December. It has since infected nearly four million people worldwide — claiming more than 270,000 lives — and crippled the global economy. The total number infected in China is 82,901, with an official death toll of 4,633. No new deaths have been reported for nearly a month. China’s ruling Commun...