House-to-house checks of all Wuhan residents
One of the highest-ranking doctors in Wuhan is feared to have died after contracting coronavirus, as police prepare to begin house-to-house checks of all nine million residents in the city.
Liu Zhiming, the director of Wuhan Wuchang hospital, was reported in a tweet from the state-run People’s Daily newspaper to have died on Monday. However, within minutes the tweet was deleted after denials from the provincial health commission covering Wuhan, which said that Dr Liu was still being ‘‘resuscitated’’.
The reports mirrored confusion over the death on February 7 of Li Wenliang, 33, a Wuhan Central hospital doctor silenced by Beijing when he became the first to warn of the coronavirus.
The developments on Monday night came hours after the new Communist Party chief of Wuhan declared a threeday operation to cleanse the city, ordering police and other officials to check every resident. Those found to be displaying symptoms of the virus – which has killed 1873 people across the world – will be taken to hospital and all suspected cases will be tested.
‘‘No household shall be left unchecked, and not a single person will be left behind,’’ Wang Zhonglin, 57, who was appointed last week as the city’s highest official dealing with the public health crisis.
In Shanghai, doctors are using infusions of blood plasma from people who have recovered from the coronavirus to treat those still battling the infection, reporting some encouraging preliminary results, a Chinese professor says.
Lu Hongzhou, professor and codirector of the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Centre, said the hospital had set up a special clinic to administer plasma therapy and was selecting patients who were willing to donate.
The blood would be screened to check if the donor had other diseases like hepatitis B or C, he added. ‘‘We are positive that this method can be very effective in our patients.’’
There are no fully licensed treatments or vaccines against the new coronavirus, and the process of developing and testing drugs can take many months and even years.
Meanwhile, the feel-good story of how Cambodia allowed a cruise ship to dock after it was turned away elsewhere in Asia for fear of spreading a new disease took an unfortunate turn after a passenger later tested positive for the virus.
News over the weekend that an 83-year-old American woman who was on the ship and flew from Cambodia to Malaysia was found to be carrying the virus froze further movement of the passengers and crew of the Westerdam. Some are in hotels in Cambodia’s capital, Phnom Penh, while others are still aboard the ship.
– The Times, AAP