Coronavirus death toll now 2747 in China, Beijing bans entry of people from Hubei amid new alert

The strict new rule for the sprawling Capital city comes on a day when China reported 29 new deaths (until Wednesday midnight), the lowest since almost a month.

Beijing on Thursday banned the entry of everyone returning from the covid-19 outbreak epicentre Hubei province amid a spike in cases, at least one death and reports of cluster infections breaking out in the city.

The strict new rule for the sprawling Capital city comes on a day when China reported 29 new deaths (until Wednesday midnight), the lowest since almost a month.

The death toll is now 2747 in the mainland with the number of infections 78631.

“Hubei, the central Chinese province at the epicentre of the outbreak, reported 409 new cases and 26 deaths on Wednesday. Beijing and the provinces of Heilongjiang and Henan were the locations of the other three fatalities,” China’s national health commission (NHC) said on Thursday.

New infections in China excluding Hubei rebounded on Wednesday, increasing from five new cases reported on Tuesday to 24, the NHC said.

Meanwhile, top respiratory specialist Zhong Nanshan, who is leading the Chinese government’s fight against the outbreak, has said though the covid-19 first appeared in China, that does not necessarily mean it originated here.

Zhong, who is considered to be the scientist to have identified the SARS virus in 2003, also said “…the coronavirus infections would be much less if strict measures could be implemented in early December”.

The first cases of the disease were reported from Wuhan in December – even November according to one study – before spreading to rest of the province and China and then beyond its borders.

In Beijing, authorities ordered strict checks across the city after a cluster infection was found in an office building, leading to 178 people being quarantined.

All foreigners flying into Beijing will also have to go through a 14-day self-quarantine, authorities said.

State media quoted top Chinese leaders as saying that safeguarding Beijing is as important as combating the deadly virus in epicentre Wuhan in central China’s Hubei province.

“After days of zero new infections, Beijing reported 10 new cases of covid-19 infections on Wednesday, the local health authority said on Thursday, following reports that a confirmed patient left Wuhan and arrived in Beijing amid supposedly strict travel controls in Hubei province,” the tabloid, Global Times reported.

As of Thursday, Beijing recorded a total of 410 confirmed cases with five deaths, and a total of 2,658 close contacts under observation.

State media reported Thursday that Qianjiang, a city of around one million people in Hubei will pay residents 10,000 yuan ($1,426) if they proactively report symptoms of the illness and it is confirmed after testing.

Qianjiang is located around 150km from Wuhan and has so far reported 197 cases.

British medical journal the Lancet on Thursday retracted a letter from two frontline Chinese nurses in Wuhan who had called for international help after they requested that it be withdrawn because it was not a first-hand account.

In the letter, published in the journal on February 24, the nurses, who work at hospitals in the southern province of Guangdong, said they had gone to Wuhan to work in fighting the epidemic.

They went on to describe the challenges and hardships of working long hours in extreme conditions in Wuhan, and asked for medical workers worldwide to help.

“On February 26, 2020, we were informed by the authors of this correspondence that the account described therein was not a first-hand account, as the authors had claimed, and that they wished to withdraw the piece. We have therefore taken the decision to retract this correspondence,” the Lancet said in an email to HT.

In a separate email to HT, the journal explained that readers had also got in touch with them, questioning the two nurses’ version.

“Questions regarding the validity of this correspondence were brought to our attention by a number of readers,” they said.

The journal added: “Every piece of original research published across The Lancet Group is subject to peer-review. However, we also publish a range of additional content, including correspondence, which is not. In these instances, we take the perspectives provided by authors on trust.”

The letter -- and the subsequent retraction -- generated attention given China’s control over the flow of information flow about the virus and its handling.