Still unexplained
The hunt for the origins of Covid-19 has for the past four years been a tangled web of politics, power struggles, and international finger-pointing.
A 70-year-old elderly man who contracted the new coronavirus died on Wednesday, according to the authorities, that was the second fatality from the outbreak in the semi-autonomous Chinese city.
The Hospital Authority said in a statement said, “An old male patient who was infected with the novel coronavirus deteriorated and succumbed in Princess Margaret Hospital this morning.
The man was taken to hospital on 12 February after a fall at home. He had a fever and tested positive for the virus, dying a week later, the officials added.
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In mainland China, where the virus first emerged, more than 2,000 people have been killed and 74,000 infected.
Hong Kong has confirmed the virus in 62 patients, two of whom have died. The first infections were largely found within people who had travelled to the epicentre in China’s central Hubei province.
In 2003, 299 Hong Kongers were killed by an outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) — 40 per cent of the global total fatalities.
Meanwhile, the director of a hospital in Wuhan, the city at the centre of the novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak, is among those who died on Tuesday. Zhiming, a neurosurgeon, is the first hospital head to die of the Coronavirus infection.
Authorities have placed about 56 million people in hard-hit central Hubei under an unprecedented lockdown. Other cities far from the epicentre have restricted the movements of residents, while Beijing ordered people arriving in the capital to undergo a 14-day self-quarantine.
However, the epidemic has continued to spread across China. There have been some 900 cases around the world, with only five deaths outside the mainland — in France, Japan, the Philippines, Taiwan and Hong Kong.
Since the US repatriated more than 300 American passengers on Monday, Britain became the latest country to offer its citizens a way off the boat, after similar plans by Canada, Australia, Hong Kong and South Korea.
(With agency inputs)
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