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Coronavirus: New China figures highlight toll on medical staff
Chinese officials have given figures for health workers infected with the new coronavirus, amid concerns about shortages of protective equipment.
Six health workers have died and 1,716 have been infected since the outbreak, they said.
The death a week ago of Doctor Li Wenliang, who tried to warn authorities early on about the virus, provoked a burst of public anger and grief.
More than 1,300 people are now known to have died from the virus.
The latest figures show 122 new deaths in China, bringing the toll to 1,381.
The total number of infections has jumped to 63,922 cases, according to the National Health Commission.
The World Health Organization said there was no major shift in the virus’s pattern of mortality or severity, despite a spike in cases in Hubei, the epicentre of the disease, on Tuesday.
Most of this was down to Hubei using a broader definition to diagnose people, said Mike Ryan, head of WHO’s health emergencies programme.
There was also no significant rise in cases outside China, the WHO said.
However, a cruise ship docked in Japan, the Diamond Princess, saw 44 new cases, bringing the total there to 218.
What is the situation with medical workers?
Zeng Yixin, vice minister of China’s National Health Commission, said 1,102 medical workers had been infected in Wuhan, where the outbreak began, and another 400 in other parts of Hubei province.
He said the number of infections among staff was increasing
“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,” Mr Zeng said, quoted by Reuters.
Local authorities have struggled to provide protective equipment such as respiratory masks, goggles and protective suits in hospitals in the area.
One doctor told AFP news agency that he and 16 colleagues were showing possible symptoms of the virus.
Another medical worker said she and more than 100 other staff at her hospital had been quarantined. A further 30 had been confirmed to have been infected there out of a staff of 500 she told CNN.
On 7 February the plight of medical workers was highlighted by the death of Li Wenliang, a doctor at Wuhan Central Hospital who had tried to issue the first warning about the virus on 30 December.
Diamond Princess crew ‘desperate for help’ as virus tightens grip
With a total of 531 crew and seafarers, Filipinos make up half the staff of the Diamond Princess cruise ship that is quarantined in Japan‘s Yokohama port because of the coronavirus, and as the illness spreads, they are becoming increasingly worried.
On Thursday, health authorities in Japan said 44 more people had been confirmed with the infection, bringing the total to at least 218 passengers and crew, as well as one quarantine officer.
Among those crew who are infected, at least 12 of them are Filipinos, according to Japan’s health ministry, raising alarm among family members back home, as well as fellow crew members who continue to work under quarantine conditions.
The nationalities of at least three other sick crew members remained unknown as of Thursday.
While news reports are focused mostly on the 2,670 passengers of the ill-fated ship, its 1,100 crew members are on the front line, as they race against time to contain the spread of the virus inside the ship, keeping the vessel clean, while continuing to serve the passengers who have been confined mostly to their cabins.
In a social media post, Leigh Antonette Barruga from the Philippines said her brother, Paolo, is a crew member of Diamond Princess, and that her family is “heavily distressed” over the situation.
“What we can ask right now is for prayers, and to ensure the safety of the crew members and hopefully, receive medical attention,” she said.
“Their situation on the ship stresses them out and that could cause their immune system to weaken making them more vulnerable to the virus,” Yu added. “We’re desperately seeking your help. Please let them go back to their families and loved ones. It would put our minds at ease if you would just kindly let them go back home.”
Al Jazeera reached out to Paolo, as well as several other crew members, but they did not respond to requests for interviews.
According to his social media account, he started working for Princess Cruises, which operates Diamond Princess, in October 2018.
Coronavirus: ‘Pariah’ cruise ship rejected by five ports docks at last
A cruise ship that was stranded at sea, because ports were worried about passengers bringing coronavirus, has been allowed to dock in Cambodia.
The MS Westerdam had been turned away by five places in Asia in recent days.
Another cruise ship in quarantine in Japan has more than 200 infections – but the Westerdam, with more than 2,000 crew and passengers, has none.
Only on Tuesday, the cruise liner attempted to dock in Bangkok but was denied permission.
A Thai Navy ship escorted her out of the Gulf of Thailand, from where she set course for Cambodia.
On Thursday morning, the ship finally arrived at an anchoring point in the port city of Sihanoukville.
“This morning, just seeing land was such a breathtaking moment,” passenger Angela Jones from the US told Reuters. “I thought: is this real?”
The Westerdam, run by the US-based Holland America Line, departed Hong Kong on 1 February with 1,455 passengers and 802 crew on board.
The cruise had been scheduled to run for two weeks – and with those 14 days running out, there were worries about fuel and food supplies.
As well as Thailand, it was also turned away by Taiwan, Guam, the Philippines, and Japan.
“We’ve had so many near moments – we thought we were going home only to be turned away,” Ms Jones said.
The ship’s captain Vincent Smit said the ship would anchor outside Sihanoukville to allow authorities to conduct health checks on board.
Passengers will then be able to leave the ship and return to their home countries from the country’s capital Phnom Penh.
The US embassy in Cambodia said it had sent a team to assist its citizens with planning their journey.
Cambodia’s decision to welcome the MS Westerdam was praised by the chief of the World Health Organization (WHO).
It was “an example of the international solidarity we have consistently been calling for”, Director-General Tedros Ghebreyesus said.
There have been regular health checks for all passengers on board the Westerdam, and there have been no cases so far.
Coronavirus: Sharp increase in deaths and cases in Hubei
Some 242 deaths from the new coronavirus were recorded in the Chinese province of Hubei on Wednesday – the deadliest day of the outbreak.
There was also a huge increase in the number of cases, with 14,840 people diagnosed with the virus.
Hubei has started using a broader definition to diagnose people – which accounts for most of the rise in cases.
China sacked two top officials in Hubei province hours after the new figures were revealed.
Until Wednesday’s increases, the number of people diagnosed in Hubei – where the outbreak emerged – was stabilising.
But the new cases and deaths in the province have pushed the national death toll above 1,350 – with almost 60,000 infections in total.
China has been accused of suppressing the full extent of the outbreak in the past, says the BBC’s Nick Beake in Hong Kong.
Professor David Heymann, Professor of Infectious Disease Epidemiology from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said: “What has happened in China is that they have changed the definition of what the disease really is – now they are taking people who have lesser symptoms.
“The deaths are quite worrisome, there are an increased number of deaths reported, but if you look overall at the total number of deaths and the total number of cases, the fatality ratio is about the same as it has been – but it is still high, as high as the death rate in influenza.”
Meanwhile, the Communist Party secretary in Hubei, Jiang Chaoliang, has been replaced by the Shanghai party chief, Ying Yong, according to state media. The party chief of the capital city, Wuhan, has also been relieved of his duties.
It is the first major change of Hubei party officials since the outbreak began.
Earlier this week, a number of health officials were “removed” from their jobs.
What is the new diagnosis method?
The province – which accounts for more than 80% of overall Chinese infections – now includes “clinically diagnosed cases” in the number of confirmed cases.
This means it includes those showing symptoms, and having a CT scan showing an infected lung, rather than relying only on the standard nucleic acid tests.
Of the 242 new deaths in Wuhan, 135 are such “clinically diagnosed” cases.
That means, even without the new definition, the number of deaths in Hubei on Wednesday was 107 – a new high for the province.
The province’s 14,840 new infections include 13,332 clinically diagnosed cases.
Overall, the province now has 48,206 confirmed infections.
Coronavirus: China and the virus that threatens everything
On a cold Beijing morning, on an uninspiring, urban stretch of the Tonghui river, a lone figure could be seen writing giant Chinese characters in the snow.
The message taking shape on the sloping concrete embankment was to a dead doctor.
“Goodbye Li Wenliang!” it read, with the author using their own body to make the imprint of that final exclamation mark.
Five weeks earlier, Dr Li had been punished by the police for trying to warn colleagues about the dangers of a strange new virus infecting patients in his hospital in the Chinese city of Wuhan.
Now he’d succumbed to the illness himself and pictures of that frozen tribute spread fast on the Chinese internet, capturing in physical form a deep moment of national shock and anger.
There’s still a great deal we don’t know about Covid-19, to give the disease caused by the virus its official name.
Before it took its final fatal leap across the species barrier to infect its first human, it is likely to have been lurking inside the biochemistry of an – as yet unidentified – animal.
That animal, probably infected after the virus made an earlier zoological jump from a bat, is thought to have been kept in a Wuhan market, where wildlife was traded illegally.
Beyond that, the scientists trying to map its deadly trajectory from origin to epidemic can say little more with any certainty.
But while they continue their urgent, vital work to determine the speed at which it spreads and the risks it poses, one thing is beyond doubt.
A month or so on from its discovery, Covid-19 has shaken Chinese society and politics to the core.
That tiny piece of genetic material, measured in ten-thousandths of a millimetre, has set in train a humanitarian and economic catastrophe counted in more than 1,000 Chinese lives and tens of billions of Chinese yuan.
It has closed off whole cities, placing an estimated 70 million residents in effective quarantine, shutting down transport links and restricting their ability to leave their homes.
And it has exposed the limits of a political system for which social control is the highest value, breaching the rigid layers of censorship with a tsunami of grief and rage.
The risk for the ruling elite is obvious from their response, ordering into action the military, the media and every level of government from the very top to the lowliest village committee.
The consequences are now entirely dependent on questions no one knows the answers to; can they pull off the complex task of bringing a runaway epidemic under control, and if so, how long might it take?
Across the world, people seem unsure how to respond to the small number of cases being detected in their own countries.
The public mood can swing between panic – driven by the pictures of medical workers in hazmat suits – to complacency, brought on by headlines that suggest the risk is no worse than flu.
The tiny proportion killed out of the many, many millions who catch it each year still numbers in the hundreds of thousands – individually tragic, collectively a major healthcare burden.
Very early estimates suggested the new virus may be at least as deadly as flu – precisely why so much effort is now going into stopping it becoming another global pandemic.
But one new estimate suggests it could prove even deadlier yet, killing as many as 1% of those who contract it.
For any individual, that risk is still relatively small, although it’s worth noting such estimates are averages – just like flu, the risks fall more heavily on the elderly and already infirm.
But China’s experience of this epidemic demonstrates two things.
Firstly, it offers a terrifying glimpse of the potential effect on a healthcare system when you scale up infections of this kind of virus across massive populations.
Two new hospitals have had to be built in Wuhan in a matter of days, with beds for 2,600 patients, and giant stadiums and hotels are being used as quarantine centres, for almost 10,000 more.
Despite these efforts, many have still struggled to find treatment, with reports of people dying at home, unregistered in the official figures.
Secondly, it highlights the importance of taking the task of containing outbreaks of new viruses extremely seriously.
The best approach, most experts agree, is one based on transparency and trust, with good public information and proportionate, timely government action.
But in an authoritarian system, with strict censorship and an emphasis on political stability above all else, transparency and trust are in short supply.
But those measures have become necessary only because its initial response looked like the very definition of complacency.
There’s ample evidence that the warning signs were missed by the authorities, and worse, ignored.
Coronavirus: Senior Chinese officials ‘removed’ as death toll hits 1,000
China has “removed” several senior officials over their handling of the coronavirus outbreak – as the death toll passed 1,000.
The party secretary for the Hubei Health Commission, and the head of the commission, were among those who lost their jobs.
They are the most senior officials to be demoted so far.
The deputy director of the local Red Cross was also removed for “dereliction of duty” over “handling of donations”.
The two Hubei party officials will be replaced by a national figure – the deputy director of China’s National Health Commission, Wang Hesheng.
On Monday, some 103 died in Hubei province alone, a daily record, and the national death toll is now 1,016.
But the number of new infections nationally was down almost 20% from the day before, from 3,062 to 2,478.
Hubei’s health commission confirmed 2,097 new cases in the province on Monday, down from 2,618 the previous day.
According to state media, there have been hundreds of sackings, investigations and warnings across Hubei and other provinces during the outbreak.
But removal from a certain role – while regarded as a censure – does not always mean the person will be sacked entirely, as it can also mean demotion.
As well as being removed from their posts, officials can also be punished by the ruling Communist Party.
For example, the deputy head of the Red Cross, Zhang Qin, was given “a serious intra-Party warning as well as a serious administrative demerit”, state media said.
Earlier this month, the deputy head of the Wuhan bureau of statistics was removed, also with a “serious intra-party warning as well as a serious administrative demerit for violating relevant regulations to distribute face masks”.
The head of the health commission of Huanggang, the second-worst hit city in Hubei after Wuhan, has also been removed.
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