Largest public health crisis since 1949: Xi
BEIJING: Chinese President Xi Jinping has called the novel coronavirus epidemic the “largest public health emergency” since the founding of the country under Communist rule in 1949.
The outbreak has killed over 2,400 people and slowed down the world’s second largest economy in just a few weeks’ time.
Millions of people in China are currently facing restrictions on their movement in some way or the other and the epicentre Hubei province - is under a lockdown.
“This is a crisis for us and it is a big test,” Xi said at a meeting on Sunday, according to news agency Xinhua. “The Covid-19 outbreak is a major public health emergency that spreads fastest, causes the most extensive infection and is the most difficult to contain in the country since the founding of the People’s Republic of China.”
The Chinese president said, “The epidemic situation remains grim and complex and it is now a most crucial moment to curb the spread,” Xi said.
Xi gave the speech during what the state media called an “unprecedented” meeting of the ruling Communist Party of China’s (CPC) top leadership, including all members of the powerful CPC politburo’s standing committee. Thousands of provincial and local leaders also attended the meeting via video conferencing.
At least 97 more people died in China from the coronavirus infection until Saturday midnight, pushing the countrywide death toll to 2,442, health officials said on Sunday. Crucially, they said the number of new infections outside the worst-hit central Chinese province of Hubei has continued to fall.
The number of new cases rose to 648 as of Saturday, an increase from 397 on Friday, the national health commission (NHC) said. That took the total number of confirmed cases in the country to 76,936.
Among the 40,127 hospitalised patients in Hubei, 8,583 were still in severe condition and another 1,845 in critical condition.
The number of new cases outside of Hubei stood at 18, the lowest since the commission started publishing nationwide data a month ago.
On Saturday, a China-who joint expert team travelled to Wuhan to investigate the outbreak, the NHC said.