China revises up death toll in Wuhan by 1,290, up 50%

The city of Wuhan in central China has revised its official death toll of the novel coronavirus outbreak.

Wuhan officials on Friday upped the fatalities attributed to the pandemic by 1,290 to 3,869, raising the total death toll for all of China to 4,632 out of 86,629 confirmed cases across the country.

The Chinese officials explained that the increase in the city’s official death toll was because some hospitals had incorrectly reported, delayed reporting, or omitted cases after being overwhelmed by patients during the early stages of the outbreak.

Last week Chinese authorities lifted the lockdown in Wuhan, signaling a gradual return to normality.

Experts concurred with one another that the total lockdown of Wuhan had been an effective measure in stopping the rampant spread of the disease to other cities which would have led to a higher number of fatalities.

Chinese President Xi Jinping and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, spoke over phone on Thursday night, reaffirming mutual support in the fight against COVID-19 and rejecting politicization of the pandemic.

As the coronavirus disease is spreading around the globe, Xi said, all countries are faced with the arduous task of tackling the epidemic. 

Putin and Xi rejected as counterproductive attempts to blame Beijing for delaying informing the world about the coronavirus, the Kremlin said.

They also stressed the two countries' "strategic partnership" and said Russia and China were ready to help each other during the pandemic by exchanging specialists and supplying medical equipment, protective gear and medicines.

Their conversation came as US President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo claimed that the novel coronavirus had been developed at a lab in Wuhan.

China’s foreign ministry dismissed the remarks, quoting a statement by the World Health Organization (WHO) rejecting such unfounded claims.

China rejects Trump’s virus remarks, says no evidence COVID-19 made in lab

China says the World Health Organization has said there is no evidence that the new coronavirus was created in a lab.

The WHO has declared “multiple times there is no evidence the new coronavirus was created in a laboratory. Many well-known medical experts in the world also believe that claims of the so-called laboratory leaks have no scientific basis,” ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian told reporters in Beijing.

The spokesman urged Trump and Pompeo not to comment on the origin and means of transmission of the novel coronavirus and leave such matters to the scientists.

“We always believe this is a scientific issue, which should be studied by scientists and medical experts," he said. 

Trump has said that he wants to get to the bottom of a conspiracy theory that the novel coronavirus had natural origins, but it leaked accidentally from a lab in the Wuhan Institute of Virology which both the United States of America and Canada had been funding for research.

Covid-19 has spread across the planet, sending billions of people into lockdown as health workers struggle to treat those infected by the deadly virus. The US with 667,225 cases and 33,286 deaths is the worst-hit country. 

US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi blamed Trump personally for directly costing American lives through his constant denials and delays in responding to the coronavirus outbreak.

“The president’s denial at the beginning was deadly,” she told CNN’s State of the Union. “His delay in getting equipment to where it’s needed is deadly … As the president fiddles, people are dying.”

Trump has also blamed the WHO for mishandling the coronavirus pandemic, cutting the international organization’s funding in what is believed to be an effort to deflect attention from his own mishandling of the crisis.

Trump cuts WHO funding amid worst pandemic in decades

The US president has accused World Health Organization of mishandling the coronavirus pandemic.

In Europe, the rise in Britain’s novel coronavirus infection rate was highlighted as another example of delays and mismanagement by state leaders.

Austria’s Health Minister Rudolf Anschober said the growth in UK cases was “frightening” to other EU leaders.

Britain has has been described by the WHO as a “dark cloud”, while British officials have suggested that the lockdown in the UK be extended till June to stop the further spread of the virus.

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