China warns of deadlier pneumonia in Kazakhstan
Sino embassy warns citizens against illness more lethal than COVID-19
SHANGHAI—CHINA’S embassy in Kazakhstan has warned its citizens to take precautions against an outbreak of pneumonia in the country that it says is more lethal than COVID-19, a claim which the Kazakh government called “fake news.”
The embassy said in a statement on its official Wechat account late on Thursday that there had been a “significant increase” in cases in the cities of Atyrau, Aktobe and Shymkent since mid-june.
Pneumonia in Kazakhstan had killed 1,772 people in the first half of the year, with 628 deaths in June alone, including Chinese citizens, the embassy said.
“The mortality rate of the disease is much higher than that of pneumonia caused by the novel coronavirus,” it said.
It remains unclear whether it is caused by a virus related to coronavirus or by a different strain. The embassy said Kazakhstan’s health ministry and other health institutions were now carrying out a “comparative study,” but no conclusions had been made yet.
According to a Tuesday report by Kazinform, the state news agency of Kazakhstan, the number of pneumonia cases “increased 2.2 times in June as compared to the same period of 2019.”
Kazakhstan on Friday dismissed as incorrect the warning by China’s embassy.
The Kazakh health-care ministry branded Chinese media reports based on the embassy statement as “fake news.”
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 guidelines.
“The information published by some Chinese media regarding a new kind of pneumonia in Kazakhstan is incorrect,” the ministry said.
Kazakhstan, which imposed a second lockdown this week to rein in the pandemic, has a tally of almost 55,000 COVID-19 infections, including 264 deaths. The number of new cases rose on Thursday to a daily record of 1,962.