Here’s what you need to know:
- Chinese officials acknowledge that shifting methodology on how it counts cases has sown confusion.
- Cases in South Korea surge as officials report a second death.
- Another young doctor in Wuhan, the city at the heart of the outbreak, has died.
- Canada announces a new case, with possible links to cases in Iran.
- The company that makes iPhones said it would be cautious in resuming work at its Chinese factories.
Read updates in Chinese: 新冠病毒疫情最新消息汇总
Chinese officials acknowledge that shifting methodology on how it counts cases has sown confusion.
Chinese officials in the province hardest hit by the coronavirus acknowledged for the first time on Friday that their methods of confirming and reporting infection numbers had sown confusion and mistrust.
They pledged to share data more openly and efficiently.
Over the past week, the authorities in the province of Hubei, home to the city at the epicenter of the outbreak, Wuhan, have revised their case tallies three times because of shifting definitions of what counts as a confirmed case and what officials described as previously unknown information.
“The adjustment of these data has aroused great attention from the society and cast doubt on the numbers,” Tu Yuanchao, deputy director of the Hubei Provincial Health and Health Commission, said at a news conference on Friday.
The first revision occurred last week after national health officials ordered Hubei to expand its definition for confirmed cases, leading to a record-high jump in diagnoses. Then, on Tuesday, the national authorities reversed themselves — leading some state and city officials to revise already published numbers by subtracting cases.
The third revision came on Friday, when the authorities added more than 200 new cases to their previously published total. Those new infections had been confirmed belatedly among prisoners in Hubei, because the provincial prison department did not have access to the province’s epidemic reporting system, Mr. Tu said.
The authorities will no longer subtract cases from existing totals, Mr. Tu said. He said that the new secretary of Hubei Province “attached great importance” to the reductions and had “explicitly requested” that they be added back in — a move that may further confuse attempts to understand the scale of the epidemic.
The acknowledgment by provincial leaders came as national officials announced on Friday that 889 new cases of the coronavirus had been reported in China in the previous 24 hours, raising the overall total above 75,000.
The death toll went up by 118, to 2,236.
Cases in South Korea surge as officials report a second death.
South Korea reported a surge in confirmed infections and a second death from the coronavirus on Friday.
The patient, who died on Friday, was a 54-year-old woman who had been admitted to a hospital in Cheongdo, a town in the southeastern part of the country. The first death, announced on Thursday, was of a patient at the same hospital.
Health officials confirmed 100 new cases on Friday, bringing the total to 204. Worldwide, the vast majority of cases are in China, which has more than 75,000, and Japan has more than 700, most from passengers who were aboard the Diamond Princess cruise ship.
Among the new cases in South Korea, 87 were connected to a church called Shincheonji in Daegu, a city of about two and half million people near Cheongdo. Officials said a 61-year-old woman who tested positive earlier this week, and who had attended services at the church, may have spread the virus there. She also visited Cheongdo in early February, they said.
The church, founded by Lee Man-hee in 1984, says it has over 200,000 members around the world, according to the South Korean news agency Yonhap. It closed all of its churches in South Korea this week and told followers to watch its services online.
The first death was a 63-year-old patient at the same hospital who had symptoms of pneumonia, and was posthumously confirmed to have been infected. Fifteen other patients at the hospital have tested positive for the virus.
Another young doctor in Wuhan, the city at the heart of the outbreak, has died.
A 29-year-old respiratory doctor in Wuhan, the city at the heart of the coronavirus outbreak in China, died on Thursday night after being infected by the virus, according to an announcement from the hospital where he worked. It was the latest in a string of deaths among health care providers working to contain the outbreak.
The doctor, Peng Yinhua, was also among the youngest of the publicly announced victims of the virus, which has largely killed older men with underlying health conditions.
On Chinese social media, users expressed shock at Dr. Peng’s age. They also cited state media reports that Dr. Peng had planned to get married on Feb. 1, but that he had postponed the wedding because of the epidemic.
Last month, the death of another young Wuhan doctor, Li Wenliang, provoked an outpouring of anger and grief on social media. Dr. Li, 34, had been reprimanded by the local authorities for trying to warn his medical school classmates about the virus before officials had acknowledged an outbreak. When Dr. Li died of the virus, he became a potent symbol of perceived government mismanagement and concealment.
After Dr. Peng’s death, some users seemed to nod to Dr. Li as well. “We send away another hero,” one person wrote on Weibo, a Chinese Twitter-like platform.
“Exactly how many more medical staff have to die?” another wrote.
Earlier this week, another high-profile doctor, Liu Zhiming, died. Dr. Liu was the director of the Wuchang Hospital in Wuhan.
Canada announces a new case, with possible links to cases in Iran.
Officials in Canada announced a new case of the coronavirus on Friday in a patient who had recently returned from Iran, which itself had just confirmed its first few cases of the virus.
Iranian officials on Wednesday announced two coronavirus cases in the country, and then just hours later reported that both patients had died. On Friday, officials there announced two more deaths and said the patients were among 13 new confirmed cases, The Associated Press reported.
The case of the new Canadian patient, the sixth in the western province of British Columbia, could raise fears of cluster cases and an expanding global reach of the virus. Health officials are investigating viral clusters in South Korea, Japan, Singapore, Britain and France.
The source of the virus in Iran remains unknown. A senior health official there said that none of the people who have been diagnosed had traveled to China or been in contact with anyone who had traveled there, according to the state-controlled IRIB news agency.
The authorities in British Columbia said the new patient was a woman in her 30s, who was presumed positive based on local testing and was awaiting final confirmation from national officials.
The company that makes iPhones said it would be cautious in resuming work at its Chinese factories.
With much of China still on lockdown, businesses are struggling to get up and running. Foxconn, the Taiwan company that manufactures Apple’s iPhones and other gadgets, indicated just how difficult that will be.
The company on Thursday said its revenues would take a hit from the spread of the coronavirus, and that it would be “cautious” in resuming work at its factories in China. Plants outside of the country, in places like Vietnam and Mexico, were at full capacity, the company said.
The warning comes as Chinese leaders try to balance restarting the economy with controlling the spread of the coronavirus. Following repeated extensions of the Lunar New Year holiday, many migrant workers remain at home, facing mandatory quarantines and lockdowns. A number of businesses and officials have issued warnings that such policies need to be relaxed to avoid a new economic crisis.
Even if factories get all their workers back, other policies are likely to make work difficult. Some local governments require new preventive measures, like requiring workers to wear masks, or housing each worker in a single dorm room. In other cases, cities have invoked mandatory two-week quarantines on all returning workers.
Concerns about production at Foxconn, the world’s largest contract manufacturer of electronics, underscore the broader impact the epidemic could have on global supply chains. A huge portion of the world’s electronics come out of China’s factories. A longer suspension of production could hit overall supply.
New clusters of the virus were found inside China’s prisons.
China faced a new front in the coronavirus epidemic on Friday, as officials reported clusters of infections in at least four prisons in three different provinces. The outbreaks, affecting at least 512 prisoners and guards, raised the specter of the disease spreading through the country’s extensive prison system.
Two of the prisons are in Hubei Province, where the epidemic originated. Wuhan Women’s Prison reported 230 confirmed cases, while another 41 prisoners tested positive in Hanjin Prison in Shayang County, to the west, according to a statement on the provincial government’s website.
In Shandong Province, officials announced on Friday that 207 cases had emerged in a prison in the city of Jining, 450 miles east of Wuhan. The outbreak prompted the local authorities to dismiss Xie Weijun, the director and party secretary of the provincial justice department, which oversees the prisons there, along with seven other officials.
The cases there may have spread from a prison guard who developed a cough on Feb. 12 and tested positive for the virus the next day, according to a statement on Friday by the provincial government. A second guard was also found to have the virus that day after a nucleic acid test, prompting the prison authorities to begin screening the entire prison population. His diagnosis has since been confirmed.
In all, 2,077 prisoners and prison workers were tested in Shandong, with 200 prisoners and 7 guards testing positive for the coronavirus. No deaths have been reported so far.
The Shandong government is now carrying out inspections at other prisons and medical centers where prisoners are being treated for illnesses, including drug and alcohol addiction. It also plans “to quickly set up a hospital” on prison grounds to treat those infected, the statement said.
A similar outbreak in Zhejiang Province prompted the dismissal of a warden and a party secretary at a prison in the city of Quzhou. The facility reported 27 new infections on Friday, according to a report in China Daily, bringing the total number of prisoners infected there to 34. A prison guard is also believed to be the source of those infections.
Beijing stepped up its war of words over critical coverage in foreign media outlets.
The Chinese Embassy in Nepal has attacked a Nepalese newspaper for publishing a column criticizing Beijing’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak and an illustration of Mao Zedong wearing a face mask.
The Embassy said in a statement this week that the Kathmandu Post had “deliberately smeared” the government and people of China, and “viciously attacked” the nation’s political system.
The statement, which singled out the paper’s top editor, was the latest example of the Chinese government’s increasingly muscular brand of diplomacy and its efforts to publicly quash criticism of its policies, even abroad. This week, Beijing also announced it would expel three Wall Street Journal reporters in retaliation for a headline on an opinion piece.
The column in question in the Kathmandu Post is a syndicated opinion piece, entitled “China’s secrecy has made coronavirus crisis much worse.” It was originally published in The Korea Herald and reprinted by the Post on Tuesday. The paper accompanied the column with an illustration of a Chinese bank note digitally altered to depict Mao wearing a surgical face mask.
The Chinese Embassy’s rebuke singled out Anup Kaphle, the Kathmandu Post’s editor in chief, saying that he was “a parrot of some anti-China forces.” It warned that the Chinese government could take further action.
One of Asia’s poorest and least-developed democracies, Nepal has grown closer to China as it seeks to reduce its dependence on India. Chinese investors have pumped millions of dollars into the country.
In an editorial on Wednesday, the newspaper alluded to China’s growing economic influence on Nepal and accused the embassy of violating diplomatic norms by using threatening language against the outlet and disparaging its top editor.
“The Chinese embassy’s statement, ultimately, is not just about the Post, or its Editor-in-Chief,” the editorial said. “It is a rebuke to not bite the hand that feeds.”
Reporting and research were contributed by Vivian Wang, Paul Mozur, Donald G. McNeil Jr., Choe Sang-Hun, Roni Caryn Rabin, Carlos Tejada, Elaine Yu, Steven Lee Myers, Tiffany May, Amber Wang, Claire Fu, Yiwei Wang and Zoe Mou.
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