BEIJING (AP) – China is seeing a further increase in coronavirus cases in its frozen northeast as a World Health Organization team arrived to investigate the origins of the pandemic.
China also reported on Thursday its first new death attributed to COVID-19 in months, bringing the death toll to 4,635 out of 87,844 cases. China’s relatively low case numbers testify to the effectiveness of strict containment, tracking and quarantine measures, but they also raised questions about the government’s tight control over all information related to the outbreak.
The National Health Commission said that 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. Hebei province, in northern Beijing, which saw the most serious recent outbreak in China, recorded another 81 cases, marking the second consecutive day that the total number of local infections in China rose to three digits. Another 14 cases were brought from outside the country.
China has placed more than 20 million people under varying degrees of blockade in Hebei, Beijing and other areas in hopes of containing infections before next month’s Lunar New Year holiday. The government cut travel connections to and from various cities, urged people to stay in place during the holiday, postponed important political meetings and plans to release schools a week earlier to reduce the chances of infection.
Also on Thursday, a team of 10 WHO members arrived in the central city of Wuhan, where the virus was first detected in late 2019. The visit was approved by President Xi Jinping’s government after months of diplomatic disputes that spawned an unusual public complaint by the head of a Who.
State broadcaster CGTN said the team would be quarantined for two weeks and tested for the virus.
Scientists suspect that the virus, which has killed 1.9 million people since the end of 2019, has leapt onto 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 started vaccinating health workers and public servants with the COVID-19 vaccine from Chinese pharmaceutical company Sinovac Biotech. The Ministry of Health is planning to vaccinate more than 1.3 million health professionals and 17.4 million civil servants in the first phase of its vaccination program, which will eventually cover two thirds of its population, or 180 million people. its 270 million people. The first 25 health professionals to receive the injection on Thursday were employees at Cipto Mangunkusumo Hospital in Jakarta. The launch comes as Indonesia experiences a daily rise in COVID-19 infections and deaths on Wednesday, with 11,278 cases and 306 deaths in the past 24 hours. The country has confirmed 858,000 infections and 24,900 deaths since the pandemic began.
– Japan’s expanded state of emergency came into effect on Thursday, as the government tries to prevent an outbreak of new coronavirus infections, although with non-binding restrictions, many people seemed to be ignoring requests to avoid non-essential travel. People were still traveling on crowded trains and buses in Osaka, Fukuoka and other areas of the seven new prefectures placed under a state of emergency. In Tokyo, where the emergency decree has been in effect for a week, the governor has expressed concern that people are not following official guidelines. Governor Yuriko Koike said the state of emergency does not only involve avoiding eating out at night or closing restaurants early, but reducing contact between people. Experts say people are not responding to emergency measures due to increasing complacency. Japan saw coronavirus infections and deaths nearly double last month to about 302,000 and 4,200, respectively.