New mystery virus? China raises alarm, Kazakhs deny

Beijing:kazakhstan on Friday dismissed as “incorrect” a warning issued by the Chinese embassy for its citizens to guard against an outbreak of an “unknown pneumonia” in the central Asian nation. The Chinese embassy in Kazakhstan had said the disease was more lethal than Covid-19.

The Chinese embassy, located in the city of Nur Sultan, issued a statement late on Thursday on its Wechat account, flagging a “significant increase” in cases in the Kazakh cities of Atyrau, Aktobe and Shymkent since mid-june.

The statement said the pneumonia killed 1,772 people in Kazakhstan in the first half of the year, with 628 deaths taking place in June.

“The mortality rate of the disease is much higher than that of the pneumonia caused by the novel coronavirus,” it said.

On Friday, however, Kazakhstan’s health ministry said the news was “incorrect”.

According to agency reports, the ministry said its tallies of bacterial, fungal and viral pneumonia infections, which also included cases of unclear causes, were in line with World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines. “The information published by some Chinese media regarding a new kind of pneumonia in Kazakhstan is incorrect,” the ministry said.

The Kazakhstan health ministry acknowledged the presence of “viral pneumonias of unspecified aetiology”, but denied that the outbreak was new or unknown.

“In response to these reports, the ministry of health of the Republic of Kazakhstan officially declares that this information does not correspond to reality,” the statement said.