EpidemicsChina nCoV Cases Top 40,000, with More Tied to French Cluster

Published 11 February 2020

China’s daily total of 3,062 cases is up from 2,656 reported Sunday, boosting the country’s overall total to 40,171. Also, health officials reported 97 more deaths and 296 more serious cases, raising those totals to 908 and 6,484, respectively. More cases surface in more countries.

China’s novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) total grew by just over 3,000 new cases today, as an advance team from the World Health Organization (WHO) arrived in the country to lay the groundwork for an international joint mission with Chinese colleagues.

In other developments, more illnesses were reported with links to a family cluster centered at a French ski resort, two of them involving healthcare workers. Also, infections on a cruise ship docked in Japan grew by 60, and new estimates from Imperial College London put the overall fatality ratio at 1 percent, but higher in China’s main hot spot.

Deaths Pass 900
China’s daily total of 3,062 cases today is up from 2,656 reported Sunday, boosting the country’s overall total to 40,171, according to the latest report from the country’s National Health Commission (NHC). Also, health officials reported 97 more deaths and 296 more serious cases, raising those totals to 908 and 6,484, respectively.

So far, 3,281 people have been released from the hospital.

In other developments, an animal (mice) trial of a candidate mRNA vaccine against 2019-nCov launched Sunday, Xinhua, China’s state news agency reported Tuesday. It said testing is at a very early stage, and the next step will be toxicity tests in larger animals.

In addition two genomes from environmental samples taken from the outbreak market in Wuhan have been submitted to the GISAID database, and they cluster with the early human samples, adding to evidence that the market is the focus of the outbreak, Nextstrain, an open-source pathogen genome analysis project, said today on Twitter.

WHO Advance Team, R&D Meeting
CIDRAP reports that at a media telebriefing today, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, PhD, said three members of an advance team just arrived in China to lay the groundwork for an international expert team—comprising 10 to 15 people—to meet with Chinese officials.  The WHO’s team is led by Bruce Aylward, MD, MPH, a Canadian physician who led the launch of the WHO’s health emergencies program and the WHO’s West Africa Ebola outbreak response.