“Countries must stay alert to the possibility of resurgence” of COVID-19 cases, World Health Organization (WHO) warned today following reports of a new cluster in Beijing, after more than 50 days without a case in that city.
“It took more than two months for the first 100,000 cases to be reported. For the past two weeks, more than 100,000 new cases have been reported almost every single day,” WHO’s Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in Geneva during the regular COVID-19 press briefing.
Some 75% of recent cases come from 10 countries, mostly in the Americas and South Asia, according to WHO. However, increasing numbers of cases are being reported in Africa, eastern Europe, central Asia and the Middle East, said Dr Tedros.
Commenting on a new outbreak in China’s capital Beijing, Tedros said “more than 100 cases have now been confirmed. The origin and extent of the outbreak are being investigated.”
The first identified case in the new Beijing cluster had symptom onset on 9 June, and was confirmed on 11 June. Several of the initial cases were identified through six fever clinics in Beijing. Preliminary investigations revealed that some of the initial symptomatic cases had a link to the Xinfadi Market in Beijing. Preliminary laboratory investigations of throat swabs from humans and environmental samples from Xinfadi Market identified 45 positive human samples (all without symptoms at the time of reporting) and 40 positive environmental samples. One additional case without symptoms was identified as a close contact of a confirmed case.
“I think it’s important to note that that every country is different and certainly in China, when you spent over 50 days without having any significant local transmission, a cluster, like this is a concern, and it needs to be investigated and controlled, and that’s exactly what the Chinese authorities are doing,” said WHO’s Dr Michael Ryan, Executive Director of the Organization’s Health Emergencies Programme, “So, in that sense, it is big news, but in the great scheme of things around the number of cases per day around the world, it’s not, but it is significant event. We’ll track that like we’ve tracked other significant clusters.”
Dr Ryan also said “we fully expect that our colleagues in China will share that information, and it is very important and they have done so in the past, as of many countries, particularly in sharing the genetic sequence, the finding that this may represents a strain more common than transmitting in Europe is important and it may reflect a human to human transmission more than any other hypothesis, but that remains to be seen.”
While fighting the COVID-19 pandemic, Director-General Dr Tedros said “we cannot lose sight of other significant public health issues, including influenza.”
“Influenza affects every country every year and takes its own deadly toll” said DR Tedros adding that “co-circulation of COVID-19 and influenza can worsen the impact on health care systems that are already overwhelmed.”
