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WHO Team to Visit Wuhan to Investigate Coronavirus Outbreak

February 22, 2020 2:03 am

Beijing (PingWest)—World Health Organization (WHO) announced on Friday that a team of experts would travel to Wuhan, the epicenter of the coronavirus epidemic, on Saturday to investigate the disease outbreak. 

It's the fourth team sent by WHO to China since January. U.S. Embassy reveals two American experts participated in.

Prior to this, the Chinese government and the WHO announced that this expert group will conduct field inspections in Beijing, Sichuan and Guangdong instead of granting them permission to look into Wuhan. The 20-member team arrived in China last weekend and officially began work on February 17.

The experts team talked with Hubei, the virus-hit province, during a teleconference, and discussed the epidemic situation, control and prevention measures in communities and rural areas, wildlife management and drug and vaccine development, Xinhua News Agency reported.

Besides controlling the spread of the virus, a major task of the WHO team along with their Chinese counterparts is to come up with a standard medicine to cure the disease.

Authorities said Friday that the novel coronavirus has spread in two prisons in northern China's Shandong province and the eastern province Zhejiang, infecting more than 200 people.

Shandong health officials said they had designated a hospital in Jining to treat the virus patients and would also allocate facilities within the prison for treatment.

The surge in cases detected at the two prisons ended 16 straight days of declines in new cases in China excluding Hubei. Tedros Adhanom, WHO Director-General, also voiced concern about the potential spread of the virus in Shandong.

China and other countries have taken steps to curb the spread of the coronavirus to date, meaning the world still has a fighting chance to contain the outbreak, he said in a briefing on Friday.

As of February 21, the death toll in China due to coronavirus has gone up to 2,239 while the overall confirmed infection cases have climbed to 75,571, the country's health officials said.

Outside of China, there are more than 1,000 confirmed cases of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19). More than half have been on the Diamond Princess, a cruise ship docked in Japan; the rest are scattered among 27 countries, mostly in Asia.