Via Caixin Global's CX Daily update: Global infections surge as new cases in China keep falling.
Virus spread and reactions /
• Confirmed cases in China climbed to 80,424 as of Wednesday evening,. and the death toll reached 2,984.
Outside China, 13,688 confirmed cases and 233 deaths were reported in 76 countries.
• Iran temporarily released about 54,000 low-level prisoners to prevent the spread of infection in the nation’s jails. Iran was thought to have about 240,000 prisoners as of mid-2019. The country has confirmed more than 2,922 cases of coronavirus and around 92 deaths, including 15 more today, Bloomberg reported. The capital, Tehran, is believed to have more than 1,000 cases (link in Chinese).
Iranian media reported that at least 23 of the country’s 290-member parliament might have been infected because of contact with constituents across the country. Iran leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei ordered the armed forces to assist health officials in combating the outbreak.
• Singapore extended its travel ban to people who have been in Iran, South Korea and northern Italy in the previous 14 days. Before, the ban applied only to Chinese citizens and people who recently visited the Chinese mainland.
• The Australian government ordered anyone who traveled from Iran after Feb. 19 to self-isolate in their homes, after eight cases of coronavirus were identified among returnees from the country.
• Japan’s Olympics minister raised the prospect of postponing the summer games, due to start July 24, until later in the year, the BBC reported. Tokyo’s contract with the International Olympic Committee “calls for the Games to be held in 2020.” That “could be interpreted as allowing a postponement,” Seiko Hashimoto said. •
South Korea’s government will seek an additional 11.7 trillion won ($9.86 billion) to prop up businesses hit by a coronavirus outbreak that has become the world’s second-largest, Bloomberg reported.
• A researcher at Jakarta’s Stem Cell and Cancer Research Institute cast fresh doubt on Indonesia’s official coronavirus caseload. Various scientists have warned that Indonesia’s failure to test property for the disease could be behind its relatively low count, given the nation’s close person-to-person ties with China.
• The World Health Organization (WHO) reiterated that containment is possible — even as the disease also continues its troubling spread in other hotspots like Iran and Italy.
Speaking overnight, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said: “To summarize, Covid-19 spreads less efficiently than flu, transmission does not appear to be driven by people who are not sick, it causes more severe illness than flu, there are not yet any vaccines or therapeutics, and it can be contained — which is why we must do everything we can to contain it.”
Medical updates /
• Recovered patients tested positive again in several provinces, raising concerns that the outbreak could gain ground again following days of declines in new infections in most parts of China.
• Much is now known about SARS-CoV-2’s ability to infect the respiratory system, but clinical evidence is slowly emerging about how it can also damage the central nervous system (link in Chinese).
Beijing’s Ditan Hospital reported the case of a 56-year-old coronavirus patient whose disease manifested both in conventional respiratory symptoms and as viral encephalitis, or a swelling of the brain. Doctors found the virus in the man’s spinal fluid. He has since recovered and been discharged.
