Foreign Desk Report
WASHINGTON: The United States and China on Friday took their growing clash over the coronavirus pandemic to social media, with Beijing telling Secretary of State Mike Pompeo he was “lying through (his) teeth.”
In an interview on Fox News, Pompeo said Beijing “wasted valuable days” after identifying the novel coronavirus by letting “hundreds of thousands” leave the epicenter of Wuhan to places including Italy, which has surpassed China as the country with the highest death toll.
“The Chinese Communist Party didn’t get it right and put countless lives at risk as a result of that,” Pompeo said. Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying voiced anger on Twitter, writing in English: “Stop lying through your teeth!”
“As WHO experts said, China’s efforts averted hundreds of thousands of infection cases,” she tweeted.
She said that China first told the US of the novel coronavirus outbreak on January 3, with the State Department alerting Americans in Wuhan on January 15. “And now blame China for delay? Seriously?” she wrote. Hua slammed US further, calling out the American government over its apparent lack of transparency. “Why not send a WHO expert group to US to investigate?
“US CDC estimates this season flu has so far sickened at least 36 million people and killed 22,000. CDC Director admitted some were actually #COVID19,” she wrote.
State Department spokesperson Morgan Ortagus replied: “By Jan. 3, Chinese authorities had already ordered #COVID19 virus samples destroyed, silenced Wuhan doctors, and censored public concerns online.”
Hua “is right: This is a timeline the world must absolutely scrutinize”, Ortagus tweeted. Already tense relations between the two powers have worsened over the pandemic, which China has appeared to bring under control but has severely disrupted life in much of the world and infected more than 10,000 people globally.
The US last week summoned the Chinese ambassador after another foreign ministry spokesperson tweeted an unfounded conspiracy theory that the US military brought the virus to Wuhan. President Donald Trump, in turn, has angered Beijing by insisting on referring to SARS-CoV-2 as the “Chinese virus,” a terminology discouraged by the World Health Organization (WHO). China on Friday reported no new local cases of the deadly coronavirus for a second straight day, but its progress against the disease was confronted by another increase in imported infections.
The country s drop in cases offers a ray of hope for the rest of the world as a slew of other nations go into lockdown in an effort to emulate China s tactic against the disease. The number of deaths in China has also slowed dramatically, with the National Health Commission reporting only three new fatalities, the lowest daily increase since it started publishing figures in January.
In a grim milestone showing how the crisis has moved from Asia to Europe, China s death toll, now at 3,248, was overtaken on Thursday by Italy, where more than 3,400 people have now died. There have been nearly 81,000 infections in China but fewer than 7,000 people remain sick with the COVID-19 disease. The virus is believed to have emerged in an animal market in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in December. Some 56 million people in Wuhan and surrounding Hubei province were locked down in late January, but authorities are progressively easing the travel curbs as cases have dwindled. But China is now worried about a second wave of infections coming from abroad, prompting several regions including Beijing to force international arrivals to go into 14-day quarantine. The health commission reported 39 more imported cases on Friday, raising the total to 228.
China is prepared to “work with all other countries” to intensify the global fight against the deadly coronavirus pandemic, state media on Friday quoted President Xi Jinping as saying. Xi made the comments in a late-night telephone call with Russia s Vladimir Putin, Xinhua news agency reported. The Chinese leader said Beijing was “willing to make concerted efforts with Russia and all other countries to… safeguard global public health security,” the report added. “China has the confidence, capacity and certainty to achieve the ultimate victory over the epidemic,” Xinhua quoted Xi as telling Putin.
The disease, which has now claimed more than 9,800 lives worldwide, first emerged in the central Chinese city of Wuhan late last year. It has since spread to 158 countries and territories.
China has faced criticism for not acting quickly enough — and not disclosing enough information — as the outbreak erupted. “Certainly the world is paying a big price for what they did,” US President Donald Trump said Thursday. China’s imported coronavirus cases have risen to a record 228, data showed on Friday, as infected travellers spread to ever more provinces, adding pressure on authorities to toughen entry rules and health protocols.
For a second day in a row, China found no domestically transmitted cases of the virus that emerged in its central province of Hubei late last year, according to new daily figures registered on Thursday. Fears of a second wave of infections are growing just as China brings its epidemic under control, with the spread of the virus in Europe and North America spurring a rush homewards by Chinese expatriates, many of them students.
“The number of imported cases in China has further increased, and so the pressure to be on guard has also increased,” Wang Bin, an official of the National Health Commission, told a news conference in Beijing on Friday. Mainland China had 39 new imported infections on Thursday, the commission said. Fourteen of these were in the southern province of Guangdong, eight in the commercial hub of Shanghai and six in the capital, Beijing, it said in a statement.
The main entrypoints for infected travellers have been key transport hubs such as Beijing, Shanghai and Guangdong, including the city of Shenzhen, near Hong Kong. A smattering of imported cases were also reported in the city of Tianjin and the provinces of Liaoning, Heilongjiang, Shandong and Gansu in the north, as well as in the provinces of Zhejiang, Fujian, Sichuan, and the region of Guangxi further south, taking China’s total imported infections to 228. The commission did not say where the cases were believed to have originated, but provincial authorities said some of the travellers had been in Britain, Spain and the United States.
“Everyone is being very vigilant about those coming back from abroad. We must absolutely not let our guard down,” Cao, a Beijing resident who gave only his surname, told Reuters. “We cannot relax this vigilance so much that we see a rebound.”
In Gansu, five officials were punished for picking up travellers returning from overseas without permission, including two who have tested positive, the official Xinhua news agency said. As concern grows over infected arrivals from overseas, the foreign ministers of China, Japan and South Korea held a video conference on Friday to discuss cooperation to rein in the pandemic. The new imported case in Tianjin, a city of 11 million, was a 23-year-old woman studying in London who came home via Zurich, Tokyo and Beijing, Xinhua said. The northeastern city of Shenyang said its first imported case was a traveller arriving from London via Seoul, who displayed no fever or respiratory tract symptoms at the airport on March 16.
