Revisiting Hubei: How did Covid-19 events unfold in China?
China reported 14 new Covid-19 cases on Sunday. This included one new case from Wuhan where no new Covid-19 case was reported in over a month.
More than 4 million people across the globe have been infected with coronavirus while over 2.5 lakh people have lost their lives. The virus, which originated in China’s Hubei province last year, quickly spread to the rest of the world to infect people in over 200 nations.
Experts at Johns Hopkins University have released a timeline of how events unfolded in Hubei which led to coronavirus contagion taking the form of a pandemic.
The timeline points out major Covid-19 events from the time when the Wuhan City government started tracing Covid-19 cases in late December 2019, till China issued a revised death and case count in April.
Here’s a look at the timeline:
Dec 29: Wuhan City government starts to trace cases.
Jan 4: Shanghai lab detects coronavirus similar to SARS.
Jan 7: Pathogen identified as novel coronavirus.
Jan 23: Wuhan placed under quarantine, the announcement on building a new hospital within 10 days. By this time, the country had seen over 500 Covid-19 cases and more than 20 fatalities.
Feb 1: Member of the Chinese Academy of Science leads team to support Wuhan.
Feb 3: First Wuhan field hospital opens; More hospitals built overnight. At this point, the number of Covid-19 cases in the country have crossed over 13,000 with nearly 500 deaths.
Feb 14: Wuhan asks recovered patients to donate plasma.
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Feb 19: Another team of 1,299 medical workers sent to Wuhan as city disinfects sewage. The national tally breached the 60,000 mark with more than 2,000 dead.
Feb 24: China bans trade, consumption of wild animals, and postpones annual parliamentary meeting.
Feb 26: Daily new cases outside China surpass those inside the country.
March 12: China said its Covid-19 peak is over as new cases kept declining and the overall epidemic situation remained at a low level. Mi Feng, a spokesperson for the National Health Commission, at a press conference in Beijing said the number of new Covid-19 cases in Wuhan had dropped to single digit.
April 8: Wuhan lifted restrictions on outgoing travel on April 8 after nearly an 11-week lockdown and reporting a dramatic decrease in cases.
Apr 15: China issued a revised death and case count. Nearly 1,300 people who died of the coronavirus in the Chinese city of Wuhan, or half the total, were not counted in death tolls because of lapses, state media said.
May 10: China reported 14 new Covid-19 cases on Sunday. This included one new case from Wuhan where no new Covid-19 case was reported in over a month, news agency Reuters reported. The total number of Covid-19 cases in the country stands at 82,901, with over 4,600 deaths.
The United States is the worst-affected nation in the world where Covid-19 cases have crossed the one million mark. Nearly 80,000 people have succumbed to death in America. In Europe, coronavirus has infected more than 1.5 million people.
(With inputs from Johns Hopkins University, agencies)