Suspected UAE spy commits suicide in Turkish prison: Report

London, Mar 26: British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has said that the country's NHS risks becoming "overwhelmed" by the coronavirus outbreak and that the situation in Britain is just two or three weeks behind Italy.
"The numbers are very stark, and they are accelerating. We are only a matter of weeks -- two or three -- behind Italy," Johnson said, as reported by CNN.
"The Italians have a superb health care system. And yet their doctors and nurses have been completely overwhelmed by the demand. The Italian death toll is already in the thousands and climbing.
He added, "Unless we act together unless we make the heroic and collective national effort to slow the spread -- then it is all too likely that our own NHS will be similarly overwhelmed,"
"That is why this country has taken the steps that it has, in imposing restrictions never seen before either in peace or war." He said.
The problem reached a crunch point in the UK, which has dramatically increased its response to the virus outbreak this week.
Food banks that provide a lifeline for some of the estimated 14 million in poverty are running low on volunteers, many of whom have been forced to self-isolate, as well as the food itself, which is in short supply following panic-buying.
The UK has confirmed more 9,600 cases of the deadly virus with 460 deaths.
The global tally of cases has crossed 487,000 as on Thursday with 22,030 deaths globally as per the data presented by the Johns Hopkins University.

Wuhan, Apr 15: In the six days after top Chinese officials secretly determined they likely were facing a pandemic from a new coronavirus, the city of Wuhan at the epicenter of the disease hosted a mass banquet for tens of thousands of people; millions began traveling through for Lunar New Year celebrations.

President Xi Jinping warned the public on the seventh day, Janaury 20. But by that time, more than 3,000 people had been infected during almost a week of public silence, according to internal documents obtained by The Associated Press and expert estimates based on retrospective infection data.

That delay from Jan 14 to Jan. 20 was neither the first mistake made by Chinese officials at all levels in confronting the outbreak, nor the longest lag, as governments around the world have dragged their feet for weeks and even months in addressing the virus.

But the delay by the first country to face the new coronavirus came at a critical time — the beginning of the outbreak. China's attempt to walk a line between alerting the public and avoiding panic set the stage for a pandemic that has infected almost 2 million people and taken more than 126,000 lives.

A This is tremendous, a said Zuo-Feng Zhang, an epidemiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. If they took action six days earlier, there would have been much fewer patients and medical facilities would have been sufficient. We might have avoided the collapse of Wuhan's medical system.

Other experts noted that the Chinese government may have waited on warning the public to stave off hysteria, and that it did act quickly in private during that time.

But the six-day delay by China's leaders in Beijing came on top of almost two weeks during which the national Center for Disease Control did not register any cases from local officials, internal bulletins obtained by the AP confirm. Yet during that time, from Jan 5 to Jan 17, hundreds of patients were appearing in hospitals not just in Wuhan but across the country.

It's uncertain whether it was local officials who failed to report cases or national officials who failed to record them. It's also not clear exactly what officials knew at the time in Wuhan, which only opened back up last week with restrictions after its quarantine.

But what is clear, experts say, is that China's rigid controls on information, bureaucratic hurdles and a reluctance to send bad news up the chain of command muffled early warnings. The punishment of eight doctors for rumor-mongering, broadcast on national television on Jan. 2, sent a chill through the city's hospitals.

Doctors in Wuhan were afraid, said Dali Yang, a professor of Chinese politics at the University of Chicago. It was truly intimidation of an entire profession. Without these internal reports, it took the first case outside China, in Thailand on Jan 13, to galvanize leaders in Beijing into recognising the possible pandemic before them. It was only then that they launched a nationwide plan to find cases distributing CDC-sanctioned test kits, easing the criteria for confirming cases and ordering health officials to screen patients, all without telling the public.

The Chinese government has repeatedly denied suppressing information in the early days, saying it immediately reported the outbreak to the World Health Organization.

Allegations of a cover-up or lack of transparency in China are groundless, said foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian at a Thursday press conference.

The documents show that the head of China's National Health Commission, Ma Xiaowei, laid out a grim assessment of the situation on Jan. 14 in a confidential teleconference with provincial health officials.

A memo states that the teleconference was held to convey instructions on the coronavirus from President Xi Jinping, Premier Li Keqiang and Vice Premier Sun Chunlan, but does not specify what those instructions were.

The epidemic situation is still severe and complex, the most severe challenge since SARS in 2003, and is likely to develop into a major public health event, the memo cites Ma as saying.

The National Health Commission is the top medical agency in the country. In a faxed statement, the Commission said it had organised the teleconference because of the case reported in Thailand and the possibility of the virus spreading during New Year travel. It added that China had published information on the outbreak in an open, transparent, responsible and timely manner," in accordance with important instructions repeatedly issued by President Xi.

The documents come from an anonymous source in the medical field who did not want to be named for fear of retribution. The AP confirmed the contents with two other sources in public health familiar with the teleconference. Some of the memo's contents also appeared in a public notice about the teleconference, stripped of key details and published in February.

Under a section titled sober understanding of the situation, the memo said that clustered cases suggest that human-to-human transmission is possible. It singled out the case in Thailand, saying that the situation had changed significantly because of the possible spread of the virus abroad.

With the coming of the Spring Festival, many people will be traveling, and the risk of transmission and spread is high, the memo continued.

New Delhi, Mar 24: Reports of a person in China dying due to a virus called hantavirus have spread panic at a time when the world is battling the pandemic of novel coronavirus, which began in China.

The novel coronavirus has killed over 16,000 people around the world and the outbreak is yet to be brought under control.

This morning, hantavirus became one of the top trends on Twitter after the Chinese state media tweeted about one person in the country dying due the virus. However, it turns out, hantavirus is not a new virus and has been infecting humans for decades.

Global Times, a state-run English-language newspaper, wrote on Twitter on Tuesday, "A person from Yunnan Province died while on his way back to Shandong Province for work on a chartered bus on Monday. He was tested positive for hantavirus. Other 32 people on bus were tested."

Global Times's hantavirus report on Twitter has been shared over 6,000 times.

On Tuesday, hantavirus was one of the top trends on Twitter.

WHAT IS HANTAVIRUS?

Some people are calling it a new virus but so is not the case. United States's National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) in a journal writes that currently, the hantavirus genus includes more than 21 species.

"Hantaviruses in the Americas are known as 'New World' hantaviruses and may cause hantavirus pulmonary syndrome [HPS]," CDC says. "Other hantaviruses, known as 'Old World' hantaviruses, are found mostly in Europe and Asia and may cause hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome [HFRS]."

Any man, woman, or child who is around mice or rats that carry harmful hantaviruses can get HPS.

People get HPS when they breath in hantaviruses. This can happen when rodent urine and droppings that contain a hantavirus are stirred up into the air. People can also become infected when they touch mouse or rat urine, droppings, or nesting materials that contain the virus and then touch their eyes, nose, or mouth. They can also get HPS from a mouse or rat bite.

In the US, 10 confirmed cases of hantavirus infection in people who visited Yosemite National Park in California, US, in November 2012, were reported. Similarly, in 2017, CDC assisted health officials in investigating an outbreak of Seoul virus infection that infected 17 people in seven states.

WHAT ARE THE SYMPTOMS OF HANTAVIRUS?

If people get HPS, they will feel sick one to five weeks after they were around mice or rats that carried a hantavirus.

At first people with HPS will have:

Fever
Severe muscle aches
Fatigue

After a few days, they will have a hard time breathing. Sometimes people will have headaches, dizziness, chills, nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea, and stomach pain.

Usually, people do not have a runny nose, sore throat, or a rash.