Wuhan tests 10 million during three-week blitz
NEARLY 10 million people have been tested for coronavirus as part of a three-week blitz in Wuhan, where Covid-19 was first detected late last year.
Only 300 positive cases were found, with all showing no symptoms, health authorities said.
The city found no infections among 1,174 close contacts of the people who tested positive, suggesting they were not spreading the virus easily to others.
That is a potentially encouraging development because of widespread concern that infected people without symptoms could be silent spreaders of the disease.
Feng Zijian, vice director of China’s Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, told state broadcaster CCTV: “It not only makes the people of Wuhan feel at ease, it also increases people’s confidence in all of China.”
There is no definitive answer yet on the level of risk posed by asymptomatic cases, with anecdotal evidence and studies to date producing conflicting answers.
Wuhan was by far the hardest hit city in China, accounting for more than 80% of the country’s deaths, according to government figures.
A city official announced on Tuesday that the city completed 9.9 million tests from May 14 to June 1.
If those tested previously are included, virtually everyone above the age of five in the city of 11 million people has been tested, said Li Lanjuan, a member of a National Health Commission expert team.
“The city of Wuhan is safe”, she said at a news conference with city officials.
The campaign was launched after a small cluster of cases was found in a residential compound, sparking concern about a possible second wave of infections as Wuhan emerged from a 10-week lockdown.
The industrial city on the Yangtze River in central China spent 900 million yuan (about £100m) on the tests,
AROUND THE WORLD
CORONAVIRUS has infected more than 6.3 million people across the world and killed more than 378,000, according to a tally kept by Johns Hopkins University.
Here are the latest updates on the pandemic from around the world:
NEW ZEALAND
New Zealand is on the verge of eradicating the virus from its shores after it notched a 13th straight day with no reported new infections.
Only a single person in the nation of five million people is known to still have the virus, and that person is not in hospital. the official Xinhua News Agency said.
It quoted Executive Deputy Mayor Hu Yabo as saying the cost was “totally worthwhile” to reassure residents, lifting a “psychological lockdown”.
Clarence Tam, an assistant professor of public health at the National University of Singapore, called the results reassuring but said more information is needed about the value of this kind of mass screening when the risk is already low.
He noted the tests, while generally accurate, sometimes give a positive result for uninfected people, and the very low number in Wuhan was well within the range of expected error.
“As more countries adopt mass
However, it remains likely that the country will import new cases once it reopens its borders, and officials say their aim remains to stamp out new infections as they arise.
The country has already lifted many of its virus restrictions and could remove most of those that remain, including limiting crowd sizes, next week. Just over 1,500 people have contracted the virus during the outbreak, including 22 who died.
PAKISTAN
Pakistan reported a record single-day spike in coronavirusrelated deaths with 82 new fatalities and 4,688 cases that it says resulted from increased testing in its latest 24 hours of figures.
Pakistan’s outbreak has grown screening strategies, a challenge will be to try and minimise the chances of detecting false positives”, Mr Tam said.
“This has some implications, because in Wuhan for example, those who tested positive and more than 1,000 of their contacts were quarantined.”
The rapid testing of so many people was made possible in part through batch testing, in which samples from up to five people are mixed together, Xinhua reported.
If the result is positive, then the people are individually tested.
Meanwhile, a former MI6 chief has said he believes the origins of the coronavirus pandemic can be traced to the virus accidentally escaping
steadily since the country’s first case in February.
Since then, 1,770 people have died and 85,264 have tested positive.
As many as 901 patients were listed in critical condition at hospitals yesterday.
The country has barely 3,000 intensive care beds serving a population of 220 million.
Pakistan for the first time conducted over 20,000 tests in the 24 hours up until yesterday.
It has done more than 615,000 tests after increasing its testing capacity from only two labs in February.
The spike comes after Prime Minister Imran Khan eased lockdown restrictions over experts’ recommendations to maintain them to prevent the spread of the virus. from a Chinese laboratory. On The Daily Telegraph’s Planet Normal podcast, Sir Richard Dearlove, who spent 38 years with Britain’s intelligence service, said he had seen a new scientific report that suggested the virus was engineered by Chinese scientists.
Since the start of the pandemic, many experts have dismissed claims the virus was engineered as “conspiracy theories”. They widely agree it originated in animals before being transmitted to humans.
Professor David Robertson from the University of Glasgow told the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee last month that there was “really no evidence” of the virus being man-made.
“I don’t think we’re clever enough to have designed this virus – it’s far too unique,” he said. “There is really no evidence for this. We can all enjoy a conspiracy theory but you need to have evidence.”
Downing Street said officials had seen no evidence the virus was manmade. But Sir Richard said a scientific paper published by a NorwegianBritish research team suggested key elements in the genetic sequence of the virus were “inserted” and may not have evolved naturally.
The Daily Telegraph reported that in the study, produced by Professor Angus Dalgleish of St George’s Hospital at the University of London and Norwegian virologist Birger Sorensen, the scientists claim to have found “inserted sections placed on the SARS-CoV-2 spike surface” which could explain how the virus binds with human cells.
In the podcast, Sir Richard suggested scientists may have been experimenting on bat coronaviruses when Covid-19 escaped. He also raised the prospect of China potentially paying for the global damage caused by the pandemic.
The Prime Minister’s official spokesman said: “Both the Health Secretary and the chief medical officer’s office have spoken about this previously and have said that we have seen no evidence that the virus is man-made.”
Authorities have blamed people not adhering to social distancing regulations for the growing outbreak.
INDONESIA
Authorities in Indonesia’s Jakarta will ease a partial lockdown as the world’s fourth most populous nation braces to gradually reopen its economy.
Governor Anies Baswedan announced the reopening of mosques, churches and temples today but only at half capacity.
Offices, public transport, restaurants, grocery stores and beaches will be allowed to operate, also at half capacity.
Shopping centres and parks are scheduled to reopen in mid-June and schools remain shut this month.