BEIJING (AP) – China sees further rise in frozen Northeast coronavirus cases as World Health Organization the team arrived to investigate the origins of the pandemic.
China also reported on Thursday its first new death attributed to COVID-19 in months, raising the toll to 4,635 among 87,844 cases. China’s relatively low case figures are a testament to the effectiveness of strict containment, tracking and quarantine measures, but they have also raised questions about the government’s strong control over all information related to the outbreak.
The National Health Commission said Heilongjiang province in the region traditionally known as Manchuria registered 43 new cases, most of them centered in the city of Suihua, outside the provincial capital of Harbin. The northern province of Hebei, on the outskirts of Beijing, which has seen the most recent recent outbreak in China, recorded another 81 cases, marking the second day in a row. Another 14 cases were filed outside the country.
China has placed more than 20 million people under varying degrees of closure in Hebei, Beijing and other areas in hopes of causing infections before next month’s lunar New Year holidays. The government has cut travel links to and from various cities, urged people to stay on holiday, postponed major political meetings and planned to leave schools a week earlier to reduce the chances of infection.
Also on Thursday, a ten-member WHO team arrived in the central city of Wuhan, where the virus was first detected in late 2019. The visit was approved by the government of President Xi Jinping after months of diplomatic disputes that provoked an unusual public complaint from the head of the WHO.
State broadcaster CGTN said the computer will be in quarantine for two weeks and will be tested for the virus.
Scientists suspect the virus that has killed 1.9 million people since late 2019 jumped to humans from bats or other animals, probably in southwest China.
The WHO team includes viruses and other experts from the United States, Australia, Germany, Japan, Britain, Russia, the Netherlands, Qatar and Vietnam.
In other developments in the Asia-Pacific region:
– Indonesia began vaccinating health care workers and public officials with the COVID-19 vaccine from Chinese pharmaceutical company Sinovac Biotech. The Ministry of Health plans to vaccinate more than 1.3 million health workers and 17.4 million civil servants in the first stage of its vaccination program, which is ultimately intended to cover two-thirds of its population, or 180 million of its 270 million people. The first 25 health workers who received the jab were employees of Jakarta’s Cipto Mangunkusumo Hospital. The release comes as Indonesia recorded a maximum daily number of COVID-19 infections and deaths on Wednesday, with 11,278 cases and 306 deaths in the last 24 hours. The country has confirmed 858,000 infections and 24,900 deaths since the pandemic began.