Dubai, Feb 27: Twenty two people have died so far from the new coronavirus in Iran, the official Iranian news agency IRNA reported in a chart it published on Thursday.
The number of people diagnosed with the disease is 141, the chart showed. It did not specify whether those who have died were included in the tally of those infected.
Iranian officials on Wednesday reported a total of 139 cases of coronavirus and 19 deaths.
Beijing, Feb 18: Police in China have arrested a prominent activist who had been a fugitive for weeks and criticised President Xi Jinping's handling of the coronavirus epidemic while in hiding, a rights group said Tuesday.
Anti-corruption activist Xu Zhiyong was arrested on Saturday after being on the run since December, according to Amnesty International.
China's ruling Communist Party has severely curtailed civil liberties since Xi took power in 2012, rounding up rights lawyers, labour activists and even Marxist students.
The death this month of a whistleblowing doctor who was reprimanded by police for raising the alarm about the deadly new virus before dying of it himself triggered rare calls for political reform and freedom of speech.
The "Chinese government's battle against the coronavirus has in no way diverted it from its ongoing general campaign to crush all dissenting voices," said Patrick Poon, China researcher at Amnesty International, in an emailed statement.
Another source, who spoke to news agency on the condition of anonymity, said Xu had been arrested in the southern city of Guangzhou.
Guangzhou police did not respond to requests for comment.
Xu went into hiding after authorities broke up a December gathering of intellectuals discussing political reform in the eastern coastal city of Xiamen in Fujian province, prior to the coronavirus crisis.
Over a dozen lawyers and activists were detained or disappeared after the Xiamen gathering, according to rights groups -- and Xu's detention appears linked to his presence at the meeting, explained Poon.
But while on the run, Xu continued to post information on Twitter about rights issues.
On February 4 Xu released an article calling on Xi to step down and criticised his leadership across a range of issues including the US-China trade war, Hong Kong's pro-democracy protests and the coronavirus epidemic, which has now killed nearly 1,900 people.
"Medical supplies are tight, hospitals are filled with patients, and a large number of infected people have no way to be diagnosed," he wrote. "It's a mess."
"The coronavirus outbreak shows just how important values like freedom of expression and transparency are -- the exact values that Xu has long advocated," Yaqiu Wang, China researcher at Human Rights Watch, told news agency.
But the disappearance of Xu illustrates how the Chinese state "persists in its old ways" by "silencing its critics", she said.
Xu -- who founded a movement calling for greater transparency among high-ranking officials -- previously served a four-year prison sentence from 2013 to 2017 for organising an "illegal gathering".
"That he was a fugitive for so many days while continuing to speak out, that in itself was... a kind of challenge to (Chinese authorities)," said Hua Ze, a long-time friend of Xu who told AFP she lost contact with the Chinese activist on Saturday morning.
May 18: Risk managers expect a prolonged global recession as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, a report by the World Economic Forum showed on Tuesday.
Two-thirds of the 347 respondents to the survey - carried out in response to the outbreak - put a lengthy contraction in the global economy top of their list of concerns for the next 18 months.
Half of risk managers expected bankruptcies and industry consolidation, the failure of industries to recover and high levels of unemployment, particularly among the young.
“The crisis has devastated lives and livelihoods. It has triggered an economic crisis with far-reaching implications and revealed the inadequacies of the past," said Saadia Zahidi, managing director of the World Economic Forum.
Environmental goals risk being discarded as a result of the pandemic, the report said, but governments should try to carve out a "green recovery".
"We now have a unique opportunity to use this crisis to do things differently and build back better economies that are more sustainable, resilient and inclusive," Zahidi said.
The report was compiled by the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Advisory Board together with Marsh & McLennan Companies Inc and Zurich Insurance Group.
Risk managers were surveyed between April 1 and 13.
Washington, Apr 19: President Donald Trump has expressed his doubts over the official Chinese figures on the number of deaths in their country due to the novel coronavirus pandemic, claiming that the fatalities were way ahead of the US.
Trump's comments come two days after another 1,300 fatalities were added to the official count in the city of Wuhan, where the outbreak started. The revision puts China's overall death toll to more than 4,600.
"We are not number one; China is number one just so you understand," Trump told reporters at a White House news conference on Saturday. "They are way ahead of us in terms of death. It's not even close."
According to Trump, when highly-developed healthcare systems of the UK, France, Belgium, Italy and Spain had high fatality rates, it was O.33 in China.
The president asserted that the actual number was much more than the official Chinese death toll figures, which he said were "unrealistic".
"You know it, I know it and they know it, but you don't want to report it. Why?" he asked. "You will have to explain that. Someday I will explain it."
He also highlighted that on a per-capita basis, the mortality rate in the US was far lower than other nations of Western Europe.
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