Qatar, Ecuador report Covid-19 cases
BEIJING/SEOUL/DUBAI:SOUTH Korea reported its biggest surge in novel coronavirus cases on Saturday, while Qatar confirmed its first case after a 36-year-old Qatari woman who was evacuated to Doha from Iran tested positive.
Ecuador has confirmed the first case in the Andean country, its health ministry said on Saturday. The patient is an elderly female Ecuadorean residing in Spain. The patient arrived in Ecuador on February 14 on a direct flight from Madrid without showing any symptoms, but soon fell ill and went to a hospital where she was diagnosed with the virus.
South Korea has the most cases outside China, with 3,150 infections as 813 more patients were reported on Saturday - the country’s biggest increase to date. Three women in the Daegu area died of the illness, taking the national toll to 17.
The US has decided to postpone a meeting with leaders of Southeast Asian countries it had planned to host on March 14 due to worries about the outbreak.
Iran is preparing for the possibility of “tens of thousands” of people getting tested as the number of confirmed cases spiked. The illness has killed 43 people out of 593 confirmed cases in Iran.
Nazanin Zaghari-ratcliffe, a British-iranian woman jailed in Tehran, believes she has the virus, her husband said. The 41-year-old detainee complained that prison authorities are refusing to test her, despite suffering from a worsening “strange cold”, according to her spouse Richard Ratcliffe.
A Who-led team that carried out a 14-day probe into the outbreak in China said Beijing should overcome “obstacles” against acting immediately on early alerts and share key disease data “more clearly”.
Till Saturday, the infection had killed nearly 3,000 people and infected well more than 82,000 globally. China on Saturday reported at least 47 new deaths, taking the toll to 2,835 and added another 427 confirmed cases to take the number of total infections to 79,251. China has sent a group of experts to Iran to help combat the epidemic, its foreign ministry said.
France is banning all indoor public gatherings of more than 5,000 people to slow the spread of coronavirus cases and recommending that people no longer greet each other with kisses.