WHO warns of grave threat; coronavirus toll tops 1,000
‘Covid-19’ would be the new official name for the coronavirus that was first identified in China: WHO
Beijing, China - The death toll from the novel coronavirus outbreak surged past 1,000 in China on Tuesday as the World Health Organization (WHO) warned that the epidemic poses a ‘very grave’ global threat.
The WHO said ‘ Covid-19’ would be the new official name for the deadly coronavirus that was first identified in China on December 31.
“We now have a name for the disease and it’s Covid-19,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in Geneva, explaining that ‘ co’ stood for ‘corona’, ‘vi’ for ‘virus’ and ‘d’ for ‘disease’.
The WHO is holding a conference in Geneva on combatting the virus as Beijing struggles to contain a disease that has now infected more than 42,000 and reached some 25 countries.
Another 108 deaths were reported on Tuesday - the first triple-digit daily rise since the virus emerged in late December.
“With 99 per cent of cases in China, this remains very much an emergency for that country, but one that holds a very grave threat for the rest of the world,” said WHO chief.
Chinese authorities have locked down millions of people in a number of cities, while several governments have banned arrivals from China and major airlines have suspended flights in a bid to keep the disease away from their shores.
The death toll has now reached 1,016, although the mortality rate remains relatively low at 2.4 per cent.
But the case of a British man who passed on the virus to at least 11 other people - without having been in China - has raised fears of a new phase of contagion abroad. The 53 year old - dubbed a ‘super-spreader’ by some British media, said on Tuesday he had fully recovered, but remained in isolation in a central London hospital.
Most cases overseas have involved people who had been in Wuhan, the quarantined central Chinese city where the virus emerged late last year, or people infected by others who had been at the epicentre.
But the Briton caught the virus while attending a conference in Singapore and then passed it on to several compatriots while on holiday in the French Alps, before finally being diagnosed back in Britain.
“The detection of this small number of cases could be the spark that becomes a bigger fire,” Tedros said, urging countries to seize on the ‘window of opportunity’ to prevent a bigger outbreak. Michael Ryan, head of the WHO’s Health Emergencies Programme, said it was ‘way too early’ to call the Singapore conference a ‘super-spreading event’.
As the number of cases in
Britain doubled to eight, the government called the novel coronavirus a ‘serious and imminent threat’, and said anyone with the disease could be forcibly quarantined if deemed a threat to public health.
The biggest cluster of cases outside China is aboard the Diamond Princess cruise ship moored off Japan, where 135 people have been positively diagnosed. The ship has been in quarantine since arriving off the
Japanese coast last week after the virus was detected in a former passenger who disembarked last month in Hong Kong.
Chinese authorities, meanwhile, dismissed two senior health officials from Hubei, the central province where some 56mn people, including in its capital Wuhan, have been under lockdown since late last month.
They also tightened restric
tions in the city, forbidding people with fever from visiting hospitals outside of their home districts and sealing off residential compounds.
Local authorities in Wuhan and Hubei have faced a torrent of criticism for hiding the extent of the outbreak in early January. Most deaths and cases are in Hubei.
The death of a whistleblowing doctor from Wuhan has sparked calls for political reform in China. President Xi Jinping has largely kept out of the public eye since the outbreak spiralled across the country from Hubei. But he emerged on Monday, pictured wearing a mask and having his temperature taken at a hospital in Beijing where he spoke with medical staff and patients.
The detection of small number of cases could be the spark that becomes a bigger fire
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus