China’s coronavirus death toll rises to 636

Mangalore Today News Network / Yahoo

Wuhan, Feb 07, 2020:  Forty one more persons tested positive for the novel coronavirus on board the quarantined cruise ship in Japan, bringing the total number of cases on the vessel to 61. The drastic jump in infected passengers on the cruise vessel comes as the cruise ship was under the two-week quarantine with about 3,700 persons on-board.

 

The official death toll in the epidemic has climbed to 636, while the total number of confirmed cases crossed 31,000, Chinese health officials said on Friday. The outbreak has triggered panic across the globe, with over 200 cases reported overseas. So far, the vast majority of deaths have been in Hubei, though the Philippines and Hong Kong have reported a death each. In India, three confirmed cases of the virus have been reported in Kerala.

On Thursday, China vehemently denied a Taiwan media report that Beijing is under-reporting the death toll and infected cases from the virus outbreak. Tencent, which runs popular social media App WeChat, over the weekend seems to have "inadvertently released what is potentially the actual number of infections and deaths, which were astronomically higher than the official figures," Taiwan News reported. "The Tencent webpage showed confirmed cases of the Wuhan virus in China as standing at 154,023, ten times the official figure at the time... Most ominously, the death toll listed was 24,589, vastly higher than the 300 officially listed that day," the report claimed.