Coronavirus toll nears 3,000 mark in China

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Chinese health authorities on Tuesday said 31 new deaths were reported across the mainland until Monday midnight, pushing the toll to 2943 dead in the ongoing Covid-19 outbreak.

At least 125 new cases were also reported of the disease with the total infection number soaring to 80,151, the national health commission (NHC) said on Tuesday.

Globally, the escalating epidemic has now killed more than 3,000 people and sickened more than 89,000 with the vast majority of cases in China.

While the number of new cases recorded daily in China has now declined daily for days, the pathogen continues spreading fast in South Korea, Japan, Iran and Italy, prompting increased travel warnings and restrictions.

Cases have been discovered in more than 70 countries.

Most of the 125 new cases – 114 – in China were reported from the epicentre of the central Chinese province of Hubei and its locked down capital, Wuhan, where the first case of this new strain of coronavirus was first discovered late last year.

“The Hubei province reported 114 new cases of novel coronavirus pneumonia on Mar 2, with 31 new deaths and 2,410 cases of recovery. The total number of infections in the province climbed to 67,217 with 36,167 recovered and 2,834 dead,” the NHC said.

While the epidemic situation is showing signs of improvement in China, hundreds of millions of people across the country continue to face some form restrictions on their movements, part of an unprecedented effort to isolate the pathogen and prevent human-to-human transmission.

Scientists in China and elsewhere are continuing to grapple with the new strain of the virus.

Authorities in Hefei, in eastern China’s Anhui province, reported a case on Monday who showed no symptoms, forcing 177 people to be put into quarantine.

The man, surnamed Xu 43, is a worker in a local plastic products company. He was reported by a local hospital, according to the Hefei health commission’s website.

“Test results of the 177 close contacts have turned out to be negative so far. The results on another 269 workers in the same factory where Xu works are also negative,” the NHC was quoted as saying by the state media.

The head of the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Monday that the spread of Covid-19 in South Korea, Italy, Iran and Japan has become the greatest concern.

South Korea has so far reported more than 4,200 cases and 22 deaths, meaning it has more than half of all cases outside China, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a daily briefing.

In Italy, the death toll has risen to 52, with 1,835 cases confirmed until Monday.

In Japan, as of Monday, the number of confirmed cases had risen to more than 960, with over 700 of them coming from the virus-hit Diamond Princess cruise ship quarantined in the port city of Yokohama.