New Coronavirus: Global Experts Meet in Beijing
International experts dispatched to Beijing by the World Health Organization (WHO) have started to discuss with their Chinese counterparts the epidemic of the new coronavirus, the spread of which is “impossible to predict”, the agency announced on Sunday evening of ONU.
“We look forward to this important and vital collaboration contributing to global knowledge of the # COVID19 epidemic,” said WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on Twitter.
Read also: Coronavirus: US to evacuate citizens from virus-infected cruise ship
The meeting comes as the toll of the viral pneumonia epidemic has further increased in mainland China with 1,765 dead now, according to official figures released Monday. The rate of contamination nevertheless begins a decline.
Outside mainland China, where at least 70,400 people have been infected, nearly 600 cases of contamination by the coronavirus epidemic have been confirmed in around 30 countries around the world.
While the Covid-19 killed for the first time Friday outside of Asia, in this case an 80-year-old Chinese tourist in France, a senior Chinese official estimated that his country was in the process of controlling the epidemic: “We can already see the effect of measures to control and prevent the epidemic in different parts of the country,” said Chinese Ministry of Health spokesman Mi Feng.
Visiting Pakistan, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said he was confident that “the gigantic effort” made by China “will allow the progressive reduction of the disease”.
But the head of the WHO for his part warned that it was “impossible to predict which direction the epidemic will take”. “We ask all governments, all societies and all news organizations to work with us to raise the appropriate level of alarm without blowing the embers of hysteria,” he told the conference. Munich on Security.
According to the latest report released by Beijing on Sunday, the epidemic killed 1,665 people, most of them in central Hubei province, where the virus appeared in December. 142 people have died in the last 24 hours.
More than 68,000 people have been infected since the start of the crisis, but the number of new daily cases tends to settle: it reached Sunday the figure of 2,009, the third day of decline in a row.
