SHANGHAI / BEIJING (Reuters) – China is struggling with the worst outbreak of COVID-19 since March 2020, with one province setting a record rise daily in business, as an independent panel assessing the global pandemic said China could do more do to limit the initial constraint. outbreak.
The state-sponsored tabloid Global Times on Tuesday defended China’s early handling of COVID-19, saying no country has any experience in handling the virus.
“Looking back, no country can perform perfectly against a new virus … No country can guarantee that it will not make mistakes if a similar epidemic occurs again,” he said.
China reported more than 100 new COVID-19 cases for a seventh day on Tuesday. The national health authority posted 118 new cases in a statement Monday, up from 109 a day earlier.
Of those, 106 local infections, 43 of which were reported in Jilin, set a new daily record for the northeastern province, and 35 in Hebei province, which surrounds Beijing, the National Health Commission said.
The Chinese capital itself reported one new case, while Heilongjiang reported 27 new infections in the north.
Tens of millions of people were under surveillance as some northern cities underwent mass tests amid concerns that undetected infections could spread quickly during the lunar New Year holiday, which is just weeks away.
Hundreds of millions of people travel during the holidays, mid-February this year, while migrant workers return to their home provinces to see family.
Authorities have appealed to people to avoid traveling in the run-up to the holidays and stay away from mass gatherings such as weddings.
The outbreak in Jilin was caused by an infected salesman who traveled to and from the neighboring province of Heilongjiang, the site of a previous group of infections.
The total number of new asymptomatic cases, which China does not classify as confirmed infections, dropped to 91 from 115 a day earlier.
The total number of confirmed COVID-19 cases on mainland China is 89,454, while the death toll has remained unchanged at 4,635.
An independent panel of experts who witnessed the pandemic, led by former New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark and former Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, said on Monday that Chinese officials could implement more powerful public health measures in January last year. to curb the initial outbreak.
It also criticized the World Health Organization for failing to declare an international emergency until January 30.
Hua Chunying, spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, said it had not done well enough to acknowledge that China needed to do better.
“Of course we should strive to do better, just like all other countries like the United States, Britain, Japan,” Hua said in a regular newsletter on Tuesday when asked about the review.
A WHO team is currently in Wuhan, the central Chinese city where the disease was spotted in late 2019, to investigate the origins of the pandemic that killed more than two million people worldwide.
(Reporting by Emily Chow and Wang Jing in Shanghai and Yew Lun Tian and Ryan Woo in Beijing; Edited by Richard Pullin, Michael Perry and Nick Macfie)