A boy wears a mask, behind the Beauty Arts Palace in Mexico City. The Secretariat of Health of Mexico has announced the first two confirmed cases of Covid-19. Photograph: Cristopher Rogel Blanquet/Getty Images
A boy wears a mask, behind the Beauty Arts Palace in Mexico City. The Secretariat of Health of Mexico has announced the first two confirmed cases of Covid-19. Photograph: Cristopher Rogel Blanquet/Getty Images
More than 85,000 people around the world have been confirmed to have been infected with coronavirus according to the latest figures, based on World Health Organisation and national counts:
Mainland China: 2,835 deaths among 79,251 cases, mostly in the central province of Hubei
Hong Kong: 94 cases, 2 deaths
Macao: 10 cases
South Korea: 3,150 cases, 17 deaths
Japan: 941 cases, including 705 from the Diamond Princess cruise ship, 11 deaths
They were identified as a result of mouth and nasal swabs that were being taken from every patient attending the surgery with flu-like symptoms by staff from Surrey University who specialise in the spread and epidemiology of influenza.
The northern Japanese island of Hokkaido has declared a three-week state of emergency, urging residents to stay home as much as possible until 19 March, NHK News reports.
Speaking to reporters on Friday, [Hokkaido governor] Naomichi Suzuki said the situation is getting more serious.
He urged residents to refrain from going out until March 19, and especially over this weekend.
Suzuki said many people go out on weekends, and he wants people to refrain from going out this weekend to reduce the possibility of a surge in infections.
He also said he wants children not to leave their homes unless absolutely necessary, adding that nothing is more important than life and wellbeing.
Pope Francis has cancelled official engagements for a third day in a row, the Associated Press reports. He last appeared in public on Wednesday, when he was seen coughing and blowing his nose. According to AP:
The 83-year-old pope, who lost part of a lung to a respiratory illness as a young man, has never cancelled so many official audiences or events in his seven-year papacy.
Francis is, however, continuing to work from his residence at the Vatican’s Santa Marta hotel and is receiving people in private, the Vatican press office said. On Saturday, those private meetings were with the head of the Vatican’s bishops’ office, Francis’ ambassadors to Lebanon and France and a Ukrainian archbishop.
Pope Francis at the Ash Wednesday mass, where he appeared to be suffering from a cold. He was seen blowing his nose and coughing during the service, and his voice sounded hoarse Photograph: Alberto Pizzoli/AFP via Getty Images
Cancelled were his two planned official audiences formal affairs in the Apostolic Palace where Francis would have delivered a speech and greeted a great number of people at the end. Those were to include an audience with an international bioethics organisation and with members of the scandal-marred Legion of Christ religious order.
On Sunday, Francis is expected to leave the Vatican with top Holy See bureaucrats for a week of spiritual exercises in the Roman countryside, an annual retreat that the pope attends at the start of each Lent.
The official death toll from coronavirus in Iran has reached 43, Reuters reports. There have been unofficial claims that the true figure is much higher. Reuters quoted a health official, Kianush Jahanpur, as telling state TV:
Unfortunately nine people died of the virus in the last 24 hours. The death toll is 43 now. The new confirmed infected cases since yesterday is 205 that makes the total number of confirmed infected people 593.
Iranian people wear protective masks to avoid coronavirus infection in Tehran Photograph: Wana News Agency/Reuters
The Reuters report continues:
Iran, which has the highest death toll outside China, has ordered the shutting of schools until Tuesday and the government has extended the closure of universities and a ban on concerts and sports events for a week.
Several high-ranking officials, including a vice-minister, deputy health minister and five lawmakers, have tested positive for the coronavirus as the rapid spread of the outbreak forced the government to call on people to stay at home.
Iranian media reported on Saturday that one lawmaker, elected in Iran’s 21 Februaru polls, had died of the coronavirus.
Iran’s government spokesman will hold his weekly news conference online due to the outbreak, the semi-official Mehr news agency reported.
The Chinese laboratory that first sequenced and shared the coronavirus genome publicly has been closed down by the authorities for “rectification”, the South China Morning Post reports.
On 12 January, a day after the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Centre’s laboratory shared the information online – a move that helped companies to devise new diagnostic kits for the virulent respiratory illness – officials from the Shanghai Health Commission ordered it to close.
The PHCC lab is a level-three biosafety facility that had only last month passed its annual inspections. It had obtained the necessary credentials and permissions to research the coronavirus, SCMP reported.
It seems that scientists at the laboratory acted unilaterally in releasing the virus because they thought authorities were taking too long to act. The SCMP said the team at the lab, led by Prof Zhang Yongzhen, had isolated and finished the genome sequence of the then-unknown virus on 5 January and reported its findings to the China’s national health commission the same day.
SCMP cited an unnamed source linked to the centre as saying:
The centre was not given any specific reasons why the laboratory was closed for rectification. [We have submitted] four reports [asking for permission] to reopen but we have not received any replies.
The closure has greatly affected the scientists and their research when they should be racing against the clock to find the means to help put the novel coronavirus outbreak under control.
An entire Italian Serie C football team is in quarantine after three players and an official tested positive for coronavirus.
Players from Pianese, a side based in Tuscany, began to exhibit symptoms last Saturday, while the team played away against Allesandria. The Siena-based club said in a statement:
At the moment those infected are four – three players and a team official.
The first is a young player who had started to experience a slight rise in temperature and headache last Saturday, when the team was away to Alessandria to play a championship game.
The second player is in self-isolation at his home, while not showing any symptoms, as well as the third player who is slightly feverish.
The fourth person tested positive for the swab is a club official who this morning, after spending the night in a feverish state, was transported by ambulance to the hospital in Siena.
Currently all the players, the technical staff and the managers present during the trip last weekend are in a 15-day quarantine.
Vietnam has announced that all 16 infected coronavirus patients detected in the country have been discharged from hospital and declared cured, Al Jazeera reports.
According to the broadcaster, the Vietnamese government has detected no new cases of coronavirus for the past 15 days.
For the past 15 days, including on Friday, the government also detected no new cases of infections, the last one having been reported on 13 February.
“If fighting Covid-19 has been a war, then we have won the first round but not the entire war because the situation can be very unpredictable,” the deputy prime minister, Vu Duc Dam, was quoted as saying.
A woman wearing a protective face mask walks on a street in Hanoi. Vietnamese authorities have declared all 16 of the country’s coronavirus cases cured Photograph: Manan Vatsyayana/AFP via Getty Images
Vietnam has taken strict measures to halt the spread of the virus, including shutting down schools across the country. A village north of Hanoi remains under lockdown.
An expat teacher in Vietnam tells the Guardian:
Ho Chi Minh officials in Vietnam have announced they are closing the schools for another two weeks, after already being closed for the month of February. Kindergartens and younger levels will not return until the 15th [of March] whilst secondary students can return on the 8th.
Hanoi have also announced another week off school for all levels until the 8th.
Many expat teachers have been out of work now for a month with many returning to their home country whilst the others stick it out.
The health minister Edward Argar has said the UK continues to be in a “containment phase” of coronavirus spread, and said cancelling events would not be considered unless the outbreak worsened. He told the Today programme on BBC Radio 4:
We’re still in the containment phase of this disease. We have been pretty good at containing it thus far. And the chief medical officer has been very clear that there is no reason to think that we shouldn’t be able to continue containing it, so that’s what our focus is on.
England’s chief medical officer, Prof Chris Whitty, has spoken publicly about the possibility of ramping up measures to protect the public. But Agar said there was no reason to curtail mass events.
[Whitty] said decisions on large events and whether they should go ahead will be taken at the time on the basis of the evidence. He’s not saying there is a need for that now.
Similarly, with school closures. He’s been clear there is no reason or need for schools en masse to close. If there are particular incidents, Public Health England and local teams will give advice.
So what Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer, has been saying is, these are all things that, in responsible contingency planning for the future, we will be looking at.
But we are clear that these are not needed at the moment and that we believe, as he said, that we will not need to move to that phase on the base of where we are at the moment.
Argar refused to comment on reports that the first person to contract coronavirus in the UK also passed it on to their doctor. The Guardian has been told there are fears that a doctor from the patient’s surgery may also have been infected with the virus. If confirmed, this would prompt particular concern as the GP would routinely have seen scores of patients over the course of the last week.
I’m aware of the Guardian report, but I’m going on the basis of what I’ve been told.
I haven’t had any details of that and I think it would be wrong to comment on speculation in the press without that detailed advice from the chief medical officer.
I have not been briefed on anything beyond the detail that the chief medical officer and others have given me about this individual case.
It is a new development but the chief medical officer has also said we are still doing the contact tracing around that and we are still looking into the details of that case, so it is probably a bit premature to say more than that at the moment.
South Korea has reported 219 new coronavirus cases, bringing the country’s total infections to 3,150, the Korea Centres for Disease Control and Prevention said on Saturday, Reuters reports.
The new cases are in addition to the 594 confirmed earlier in the day. Together they logged a record daily increase in infections since South Korea confirmed its first patient on 20 January.
Earlier (5.27am), we reported how South Korean authorities had asked residents to stay at home this weekend to help contain the spread of the coronavirus.
Large swathes of Seoul and other cities appear to be largely deserted.
