‘Church didn't teach to put child before mother'

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.

Canadian researchers are developing a DNA vaccine for SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 and has currently infected nearly 5,00,000 people worldwide and crippled the global economy.

Entos Pharmaceuticals, a health-care biotechnology company headed by a University of Alberta researchers, develop new therapeutic compounds using the company's proprietary drug-delivery platform and has begun manufacturing vaccine candidates against the novel coronavirus.

"Given the urgency of the situation, we can have a lead candidate vaccine within two months. Once we have that it's a race to get it into clinical trials," said John Lewis, CEO of Entos and a Professor at the University of Alberta in Canada.

Lewis said in comparison to a traditional vaccine, DNA-based vaccines hold several advantages.

Nucleic acids are introduced directly into the patient's own cells, causing them to make pieces of the virus--tricking the immune system into mounting a response without the full virus actually being present, the researcher said.

According to the company, the approach is recognised as being easier to move into large-scale manufacturing, offers improved vaccine stability and works without needing an infectious agent.

In the current absence of a vaccine for COVID-19, several companies around the world are mounting efforts to begin similar work.

The first clinical trial using a DNA-based vaccine developed by Moderna Inc.in the US on March 13.

Their approach allows for antibodies to be made in the human trial volunteers against a specific protein on the surface of the coronavirus that lets the virus enter human cells.

The hope is that the antibodies will stop the interaction.

Though this approach is designed to be effective against COVID-19 specifically, Lewis said Entos is taking a different tack.

The company plans to use plasmid DNA to amplify the production of key coronavirus surface and structural proteins with each injection, with an eye to the bigger picture.

"Many of the structural proteins in the virus are pretty well conserved across all the coronaviruses, including SARS and MERS," said Lewis.

"We're hoping that if we express more of the structural proteins that are common to most coronaviruses, we can inhibit the current COVID-19, and also potentially protect against all coronaviruses both past and future," Lewis added.

To move the project forward quickly, the company is seeking financial support from both provincial and federal levels of government.

"We have the opportunity to save a lot of lives, and I think it's really upon us and governments to find solutions for that," Lewis said.

Months after the outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan city of central China, families of those deceased, who contracted the contagious infection, stood in long queues at funeral homes demanding to receive the cremated ashes of their loved ones.

Now this has spurred questions about the actual tally of COVID-19 related casualties in Wuhan, in a renewed pressure on the Chinese government that is already struggling to control its containment narrative of the pandemic spread.

Chinese media outlet Caixin showed how trucks carrying 2,500 urns with the ashes of the deceased COVID-19 cases were being shipped in a funeral home last week. Another picture published revealed how 3,500 urns were stacked within these funeral homes. It is therefore unclear how many urns have been filled in.

According to media reports, workers at several funeral parlors declined to provide any details as to how many urns were waiting to be collected, saying they either did not know or were not authorised to share the number.

Some families said they had been forced to wait for several hours to pick up the ashes. The photos circulated as mass deaths from the virus spiked in cities across the west, including Milan, Madrid and New York, where hospitals were erecting tents to handle the overflow as global infections soar past 500,000, with 24,000 dead.

According to Chinese government figures, 2,535 people in Wuhan have died of the virus. The announcement that a lockdown in place since January would be lifted came after the country said its tally of new cases had hit zero and stepped up diplomatic outreach to other countries hard hit by the virus, sending some of them medical supplies.

But some in China have been skeptical of the accuracy of the official tally, particularly given Wuhan's overwhelmed medical system, authorities' attempts to cover up the outbreak in its initial stages, and multiple revisions to the way official cases are counted.

Residents on social media have demanded disciplinary action against top Wuhan officials.

Many people who died had Covid-19 symptoms, but weren't tested and excluded from the official case tally, Caixin said. There were also patients who died of other diseases due to a lack of proper treatment when hospitals were overwhelmed dealing with those who had the coronavirus.

There were 56,007 cremations in Wuhan in the fourth quarter of 2019, according to data from the city's civil affairs agency. The number of cremations was 1,583 higher than those in the fourth quarter of 2018 and 2,231 higher than the fourth quarter of 2017.

Two locals in Wuhan who have lost family members to the virus said online that they were informed they had to be accompanied by their employers or officials from neighborhood committees when picking up the urns, likely as a measure against public gatherings.

COVID-19 is affecting 199 countries and territories around the world. Over 664,000 coronavirus cases have been registered globally out of which 30,890 have succumbed to the infection.