Chinese President Xi Jinping says coronavirus is “practically contained.”
The President of China, Xi Jinping, today gave the outbreak of Covid-19 in the country as “practically contained”, during a surprise visit to Wuhan, the Chinese city where the disease originates and has been under quarantine since last January.
“The first results point to a stabilization of the situation and a reversal of the trend in Wuhan and Hubei [Chinese province of which Wuhan is the capital],” said Xi today, quoted by the official press.
Several cities in Hubei have been quarantined since January, with entry and exit blocked, to an extent that affects almost 60 million people.
Xi Jinping’s arrival comes after the Chinese Ministry of Health’s announcement that the number of new cases has dropped to 19, the lowest figure since the daily count began to be made nationwide.
The drop, since the thousands of new cases reported daily in February, means that drastic control measures have produced results. Don't use plagiarised sources.Get your custom essay just from $11/page
With a surgical mask on his face, Xi arrived this morning in Wuhan, where he met with residents of a local neighborhood who remain quarantined in their homes and visited Huoshenshan Hospital to “inspect the epidemic’s prevention and control work”, according to the agency official Xinhua news.
The Chinese President also visited patients being treated at that hospital and sent greetings to medical workers, encouraging them to “reaffirm confidence” in defeating the outbreak, the agency said.
Located in central China, Hubei province concentrates the majority of cases and deaths due to Covid-19 registered worldwide: 67,760 people infected and 3,024 deaths.
The new coronavirus appeared last December in Wuhan, before spreading across the country and across borders.
More than 114,000 people have been infected worldwide, of which 4,012 have died, the vast majority in China.
The spread of the disease provoked strong popular discontent in the Asian country, especially after revelations that the authorities silenced whistleblowers and hid crucial information, facilitating the spread of the outbreak.
After disappearing from the official press during the peak of the crisis, Xi Jinping was once again featured on state television news, as the leader of the “popular war” against the outbreak.
At the end of last January, when the country registered thousands of new cases per day, it was the Chinese Prime Minister, Li Keqiang, who stood up to fight the outbreak, even visiting Wuhan.
The initial failures, however, were attributed to municipal and provincial officials, who were later removed.