An emergency meeting is to be held Wednesday at the World Health Organization to assess the risks of this new virus.
The toll continues to grow. An 89-year-old man has become the fourth person to succumb to the new coronavirus that is spreading across China, authorities said on Tuesday (January 21st). The man died after having difficulty breathing in Wuhan, the city in the center of the country where the epidemic started, the local health commission said in a statement.
The offending strain is a new type of coronavirus, a family with a large number of viruses. They can cause mild illnesses in humans (like a cold) but also other more serious ones like Sras (severe acute respiratory syndrome). The virus now affects several major cities in the country and three other countries in Asia: Japan, South Korea and Thailand.
Renowned Chinese scientist Zhong Nanshan of the National Health Commission told state television CCTV that person-to-person transmission was “Proven”. This expert had helped assess the scale of the SARS epidemic in 2002-2003. It had killed 774 people worldwide (including 349 in mainland China and 299 in Hong Kong) out of 8,096 cases, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
Coming out of his silence, Chinese President Xi Jinping demanded that “the spread of the epidemic is resolutely stopped”, even as the country has entered the “greater human migration” with the Chinese New Year crossword puzzle. The country counted exactly 218 cases on Monday evening.
For its part, WHO announced the holding of an emergency meeting on Wednesday to determine whether to declare a “public health emergency of international concern”, qualification used for the most serious epidemics.
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