No sign of China virus peak
Government reports 5,000 new infections
BEIJING: China’s coronavirus outbreak showed no sign of peaking with health authorities yesterday reporting more than 5,000 new cases.
In its latest update, China’s National Health Commission said it had recorded 121 new deaths and 5,090 new coronavirus cases yesterday, taking the accumulated total of the infected to 64,446.
Some 55,748 people are being treated, while 1,383 have died of the flu-like virus that emerged in Hubei province’s capital, Wuhan, in December. The latest toll takes account of some deaths that had been double counted in Hubei, the health commission said.
The new figures give no indication the outbreak is nearing a peak, said Adam Kamradt-Scott, an infectious diseases expert at the Centre for International Security Studies at the University of Sydney.
“Based on the current trend in confirmed cases, this appears to be a clear indication that while the Chinese authorities are doing their best to prevent the spread of coronavirus, the fairly drastic measures they have implemented to date would appear to have been too little, too late,” he said.
Chinese scientists are testing two antiviral drugs and preliminary results are weeks away.
The head of a hospital in Wuhan, a city under virtual lockdown to prevent the spread of the virus, told reporters that plasma infusions from recovered patients had shown some encouraging preliminary results.
Global health authorities are still scrambling to find “patient zero” — a person who carried the disease into a company meeting in Singapore from which it spread to five other countries.
The rise in China’s reported cases reflected a decision by authorities there to reclassify a backlog of suspected cases by using patients’ chest images, and did not necessarily indicate a wider epidemic, a World Health Organization official said.
Economists are assessing the impact of the outbreak on the world’s secondlargest economy and scaling back their expectations for growth this year.
After the extended Lunar New Year holiday, many migrant workers may still be stuck in their hometowns, far from their factories. Analysts at Nomura estimated only about 21% had returned as of Thursday.
China’s economy will grow at its slowest rate since the global financial crisis in the current quarter, according to a Reuters poll of economists who said the downturn will be short-lived if the outbreak is contained.
“China is already easing its monetary policy and providing more liquidity while more stimulus is likely. Factories are starting to reopen albeit with some delays,” said Yukino Yamada, senior strategist at Daiwa Securities.
The duration of the disruption to international travel and trade is a key factor in some economists’ predictions for a slowdown in global growth in the short term. Some analysts expect another contraction in the current quarter.