BEIJING (AP) – China as World Health Organization sees new increase in coronavirus cases in frozen Northeast China team arrived to investigate the origins of the pandemic.
China also reported its first new death attributed to COVID-19 in months on Thursday, pushing the toll to 4,635 of 87,844 cases. China’s relatively low numbers are testament to the effectiveness of strict containment, detection and quarantine measures, but have also raised questions about the government’s tight grip on all information related to the outbreak.
The National Health Commission said Heilongjiang Province in the region traditionally known as Manchuria registered 43 new cases, most of them targeting the city of Suihua outside the provincial capital of Harbin. Northern Hebei Province, just outside Beijing, where China’s most serious recent outbreak occurred, recorded a further 81 cases, marking the second consecutive day that the total number of local infections in China has risen to three figures. Another 14 cases were brought from outside the country.
China has locked up more than 20 million people in Hebei, Beijing and other areas to varying degrees in hopes of preventing infections ahead of next month’s Lunar New Year holiday. The government has cut travel connections to and from various cities, urging people to stay on vacation, postponing important political rallies and plans to release schools a week earlier to reduce the risk of contamination.
Also Thursday, a 10-person WHO team arrived in the central city of Wuhan, where the virus was first discovered in late 2019. The visit was approved by President Xi Jinping’s government after months of diplomatic bickering that led to an unusual public complaint from the head of WHO.
State broadcaster CGTN said the team will be quarantined for two weeks and tested for the virus.
Scientists suspect that the virus, which has killed 1.9 million people since late 2019, jumped on humans by bats or other animals, most likely in southwest China.
The WHO team consists of virus and other experts from the United States, Australia, Germany, Japan, Great Britain, Russia, the Netherlands, Qatar and Vietnam.
In other developments in the Asia-Pacific region:
– Indonesia started vaccinating health workers and officials with the COVID-19 vaccine from Chinese drug manufacturer Sinovac Biotech. The Department of Health plans to vaccinate more than 1.3 million health workers and 17.4 million government officials in the first phase of its vaccination program, which ultimately aims to cover two-thirds of the population or 180 million of the 270 million people . The first 25 health workers who received the injection on Thursday were employees of the Cipto Mangunkusumo hospital in Jakarta. The rollout comes as Indonesia recorded a daily record daily COVID-19 infections and fatalities on Wednesday, with 11,278 cases and 306 deaths in the past 24 hours. The country has confirmed 858,000 infections and 24,900 deaths since the start of the pandemic.