BEIJING (AP) – China sees a new increase in coronavirus cases in its frozen northeast as a World Health Organization team arrived to investigate the origins of the pandemic.
China also on Thursday also attributed its first new death toll to COVID-19 in months, raising the toll to 4,635 among 87,844 cases. The relatively low figures in China are a testament to the effectiveness of strict controls, detection and quarantine measures, but have also raised questions about the government’s tight grip on all information regarding the outbreak.
The National Health Commission said Heilongjiang province in the region traditionally known as Manchuria has recorded 43 new cases, most of which are in the city of Suihua outside the provincial capital Harbin. In the northern province of Hebei just outside Beijing, which saw the most recent outbreak in China, another 81 cases were recorded, indicating for the second consecutive day that China’s total number of local infections had risen in three figures. Another 14 cases were brought from outside the country.
China has put more than 20 million people under varying degrees of lockdown in Hebei, Beijing and other areas in hopes of preventing infections ahead of next month’s New Year holidays. The government cut travel links to and from various cities, urging people to remain silent for the holidays, postponing important political rallies and planning to leave schools a week early to reduce the chance of contamination.
On Thursday, a ten-member WTO team arrived in central Wuhan city where the virus was first spotted in late 2019. The visit was approved by President Xi Jinping’s government after months of diplomatic struggle over an unusual public complaint from the head The WHO.
State broadcaster CGTN said the team would be quarantined for two weeks and tested for the virus.
Scientists suspect that the virus, which killed 1.9 million people since the end of 2019, has jumped from bats or other animals to humans, most likely in southwestern China.
The WHO team includes viruses and other experts from the United States, Australia, Germany, Japan, Britain, Russia, the Netherlands, Qatar and Vietnam.
In other developments around the Asia-Pacific region:
– Indonesia begins vaccinating health workers and government officials with Chinese drugmaker Sinovac Biotech’s COVID-19 vaccine. The Ministry of Health plans to vaccinate more than 1.3 million health workers and 17.4 million public officials in the first phase of its vaccination program, which is ultimately intended to cover two-thirds of its population, or 180 million of its 270 million people. The first 25 health workers to be hit on Thursday were employees of Cipto Mangunkusumo Hospital in Jakarta. The rollout came when Indonesia recorded a daily high in COVID-19 infections and deaths 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 pandemic began.