Beijing, Jun 15: China is locking now ten more neighbourhoods in Beijing to try and contain the spread of a new coronavirus outbreak linked to a food market, authorities announced Monday.
City official Li Junjie said at a press conference that fresh cases had been found in a second wholesale market in northwestern Haidian district, and as a result, the market and nearby schools would be closed, and people living in ten communities around it placed under lockdown.
Islamabad, Jun 25: The coronavirus cases in Pakistan crossed the 192,000-mark after 4,044 new Covid-19 infections were detected in the last 24 hours, the health ministry said on Thursday.
According to the Ministry of National Health Services, 148 more people died due to the deadly virus in the country, taking the death toll to 3,903.
With the detection of 4,044 new cases in the last 24 hours, the coronavirus tally in the country now stands at 192,970, it said.
Sindh reported a maximum number of 74,070 infections, followed by 71,191 in Punjab, 23,887 in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, 11,710 in Islamabad, 9,817 in Balochistan, 1,365 in Gilgit-Baltistan and 930 in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir.
A total of 81,307 patients have recovered so far from the disease.
Health authorities have so far conducted 1,171,976 coronavirus tests, including 21,835 in the last 24 hours.
May 12: Gunmen stormed a hospital on Tuesday in an ongoing attack in the Afghan capital Kabul, as a suicide blast killed 15 people at a funeral in the country's restive east.
Special forces rescued 80 people including mothers and babies from the Kabul hospital after three gunmen launched a morning assault, killing at least four people, the interior ministry said in a statement.
Heavily armed forces were seen carrying babies wrapped in blankets away from the scene, as the clearance operation continued.
The facility, which has a large maternity ward, is located in the west of the city, home to the capital's minority Shiite Hazara community -- a frequent target of Sunni militants from the Islamic State group.
The flare-up in violence comes as Afghanistan grapples with myriad crises including a rise in militant operations across the country and a surge in coronavirus infections.
A paediatrician who fled the hospital told AFP he heard a loud explosion at the entrance of the building.
"The hospital was full of patients and doctors, there was total panic inside," he said, asking not to be named.
The maternity services at the hospital are supported by humanitarian organisation Doctors Without Borders (MSF).
"Hospitals and health workers must not be attacked. We call on all sides to stop attacking hospitals and health workers," said deputy health minister in the city, Waheed Majroh.
Around an hour later, a suicide bomber killed at least 15 people at the funeral of a local police commander in the country's eastern Nangarhar province, according to provincial spokesman Ataullah Khogyani.
The attacker detonated his explosives in the middle of the ceremony.
Zaher Adel, spokesman for the government hospital in Jalalabad, earlier said 12 bodies had arrived from the blast site and more than 50 people were being treated for injuries.
Amir Mohammad, who was wounded in the blast, said thousands of people had gathered for the funeral, an event which often draws huge crowds in Afghanistan.
The violence comes just a day after four roadside bombs exploded in a northern district of Kabul, wounding four civilians including a child.
The bombings were later claimed by the Islamic State group, according to the SITE intelligence group.
They were just the latest in a string of IS attacks on the capital.
In March, at least 25 people were killed by a gunman at a Sikh temple in Kabul, which was later claimed by the group.
IS is also responsible for an infamous attack in March 2017 on one of the country's largest hospitals, when gunmen disguised as doctors stormed the Kabul building and killed dozens.
In recent months, the jihadist group has suffered mounting setbacks after being hunted by US and Afghan forces as well as Taliban offensives targeting their fighters, but it still retains the ability to launch major assaults on urban centres.
The Taliban have largely refrained from launching large attacks on Afghan cities since February when they signed a landmark withdrawal deal with the US meant to pave the way for peace talks with the Kabul government.
Under the agreement, the Taliban promised not to target forces from the US-led coalition, but made no such pledge toward Afghan troops and have stepped up attacks in the provinces.
The Taliban have denied involvement in both of Tuesday's attacks.
Jan 30: The death toll rose to 170 in the new virus outbreak in China on Thursday as foreign evacuees from the worst-hit region begin returning home under close observation and world health officials expressed “great concern” that the disease is starting to spread between people outside of China.
Thursday’s figures cover the previous 24 hours and represent an increase of 38 deaths and 1,737 cases for a total of 7,711. Of the new deaths, 37 were in the epicenter of the outbreak in Hubei province and one in the southwestern province of Sichuan.
The news comes as the 195 Americans evacuated from Wuhan, the Hubei province city of 11 million where the outbreak originated, are undergoing three days of testing and monitoring at a Southern California military base to make sure they do not show signs of the virus.
A group of 210 Japanese evacuees from Wuhan landed Thursday at Tokyo’s Haneda airport on a second government chartered flight, according to the foreign ministry. Reports said nine of those aboard the flight showed signs of cough and fever. Three of the 206 Japanese who returned on Wednesday tested positive for the new coronavirus, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said during a parliamentary session. Two of them showed no symptoms of the disease.
France, New Zealand, Australia and other countries are also pulling out their citizens or making plans to do so.
The World Health Organization emergencies chief said the few cases of human-to-human spread of the virus outside China — in Japan, Germany, Canada and Vietnam — were of “great concern” and were part of the reason the U.N. health agency’s director-general was reconvening a committee of experts on Thursday to assess whether the outbreak should be declared a global emergency.
The new virus has now infected more people in China than were sickened there during the 2002-2003 SARS outbreak.
Dr. Michael Ryan spoke at a news conference in Geneva on Wednesday after returning from a trip to Beijing to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping and other senior government leaders. He said China was taking “extraordinary measures in the face of an extraordinary challenge” posed by the outbreak.
To date, about 99% of the cases are in China. Ryan estimated the death rate of the new virus at 2%, but said the figure was very preliminary. With fluctuating numbers of cases and deaths, scientists are only able to produce a rough estimate of the fatality rate and it’s likely many milder cases of the virus are being missed.
In comparison, the SARS virus killed about 10% of people who caught it. The new virus is from the coronavirus family, which includes those that can cause the common cold as well as more serious illnesses such as SARS and MERS.
Scientists say there are many questions to be answered about the new virus, including just how easily it spreads and how severe it is.
In a report published Wednesday, Chinese researchers suggested that person-to-person spread among close contacts occurred as early as mid-December.
“Considerable efforts” will be needed to control the spread if this ratio holds up elsewhere, researchers wrote in the report, published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
More than half of the cases in which symptoms began before Jan. 1 were tied to a seafood market, but only 8% of cases after that have been, researchers found. They reported the average incubation period was five days.
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