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LAST UPDATE | 13 Feb 2020
JAPAN HAS ANNOUNCED its first death from the coronavirus, hours after confirming 44 more cases on a cruise ship quarantined near Tokyo.
It comes as fears of the spreading disease, officially named Covid-19 by the World Health Organisation, mount in the country.
Health minister Katsunobu Kato said the first fatality is a woman in her eighties who had been in hospital since 1 February when she was diagnosed with pneumonia.
Her confirmed diagnosis came after her death, he said.
The woman, a resident of Kanagawa prefecture near Tokyo, was the mother-in-law of a taxi driver who also became a newly confirmed case, Japanese media reported.
The country also announced 44 new cases on the Diamond Princess, which is still carrying nearly 3,500 passengers and crew members.
The ship now has 218 people infected with the virus out of 713 tested since it entered Yokohama Port on 3 February, the largest cluster of infections outside China.
Japan has 250 confirmed cases of the new disease that apparently started in Wuhan, a city in central China, in December.
China
China has reported 1,367 deaths among 52,526 cases on the mainland.
Two top-ranking politicians overseeing the epicentre of the outbreak were also fired, adding to questions over China’s handling of the crisis, just hours after President Xi Jinping claimed “positive results” in battling the outbreak.
The World Health Organisation also quickly countered Chinese reassurances that the epidemic, which has now officially killed more than 1,350 people in China, would peak in a matter of weeks.
“I think it’s way too early to try to predict the beginning, the middle or the end of this epidemic right now,” said Michael Ryan, head of WHO’s health emergencies programme.
The virus has had massive ramifications globally since emerging from the central Chinese province of Hubei last month, with many countries banning travellers from China in a bid to stop people spreading the disease.
In Hubei, where tens of millions of people are trapped as part of an unprecedented quarantine effort, 242 new deaths were reported today.
Another 14,840 people were confirmed to be infected with the virus, with the new cases and deaths by far the biggest one-day increases since the crisis began.
The jumps raised the death toll to 1,355 and the total number of nationwide infections of the virus – officially named COVID-19 – to nearly 60,000.
Hubei authorities said the huge increases were because they had broadened their definition for cases to include people “clinically diagnosed” via lung imaging.
Up until now, authorities had been documenting cases using a more sophisticated laboratory test.
The commission said it looked into past suspected cases and revised their diagnoses, suggesting that older cases were included in Thursday’s numbers.
About 56 million people in Hubei and its capital, Wuhan, are being banned from leaving as part of the quarantine efforts.
Tens of millions of other cities far from the epicentre are also enduring travel restrictions.
Ireland
This evening, the HSE that its policy and approach to Covid 19 “has not changed and remains in line with recommendations from the WHO”.
“The Department is seeking to make provision for this disease to be added to the list of notifiable disease so that doctors can routinely notify the HSE when a case is diagnosed,” the statement said.
The HSE said that Covid-19 will also be added to the list of infectious diseases that “allows a doctor to detain a probable case of infection in the highly unlikely event that a person refuses to comply with infection prevention and control protocols”.
This list includes smallpox and the same approach was taken for the SARs epidemic in 2002.
Continued skepticism
China had been praised by the World Health Organization for its transparent handling of the outbreak, in contrast to the way it concealed the extent of the deadly SARS virus epidemic in 2002-2003.
But it has faced continued scepticism among the global public, and US officials have also called for more openness from China’s Communist Party rulers, leading to fears that there may be similarities with the way it dealt with SARS.
Authorities in Hubei have been accused of concealing the gravity of the outbreak in late December and early January.
The death of an infected doctor who had tried to raise the alarm about the outbreak in December, but was silenced by authorities, triggered an outpouring of anger in China.
In the UK dozens of people who were rescued from the Chinese city of Wuhan are to be freed after two weeks in quarantine, as a woman in London became the ninth person to test positive for the illness.
Eighty-three people will leave Arrowe Park Hospital in Merseyside today, 14 days after they arrived on an evacuation flight.
All of the group – who had signed a contract agreeing to the quarantine period – have tested negative for the virus.
It comes after a ninth UK case was confirmed yesterday evening – the first instance of coronavirus in London.
The patient, who is now being treated at a specialist NHS centre at Guy’s and St Thomas’ in the capital, got the virus in China, England’s chief medical officer Professor Chris Whitty said.
As with the previously confirmed cases, officials are working to identify recent contacts she had.
Kharn Lambert, one of the quarantined patients in Merseyside, told the PA news agency ahead of the release: “I’m ecstatic and I’m so happy that everyone has come back with negative test results.”
During their time in quarantine one of the group had threatened to abscond from the isolation unit, prompting the Government to announce new legal powers allowing people with the illness to be forcibly quarantined, and forcibly sent into isolation if deemed to pose a threat.
There have been more than 44,700 cases of the virus in China, with more than 1,100 deaths.
With reporting from AFP and Dominic McGrath
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I bet they wished they had paid the additional oxygen fee, now!
Imagine taking a coach to your destination from the airport after a Ryanair flight?
@Dave Thomas: it is a two hour coach or train transfer from a lot of their airports.
@David Dickson: I think that’s what he was getting at
@Pauliebhoy: I’m having a slow Sunday.
“A few passengers” = 30 ?
What about Ryanair Rooms. Not enough accommodation in the city of Frankfort . I think not
@Euro is Dead: it was Frankfurt-Hahn, 125 kilometres to Frankfurt.
@Euro is Dead: try finding accommodation for a plane full of passengers at 11pm on a Friday night in Dublin, shannon or cork Plus for operational reasons they’d try to keep passengers together.
@Dara Smith: my sentiments exactly, you wouldn’t get a tent in Dublin or anywhere else at that hour of night
@Euro is Dead: Frankfurt Hahn is closer to Luxembourg city than it is to Frankfurt
The comments here are a bit insensitive this was a terrifying ordeal I don’t think a lovely but if compensation is the issue .
@Deborah McKenna: why not, a proper investigation into it and a penalty to make sure it never reoccurs 30 x 40k more like
Lovely bit of compensation. €400 per pax minimum :)
@kevinhunt101: I think burst eardrums, the embarrassment of involuntary bowel purging, near suffocation and the fear of your impending death must be worth more than €400.
@Paraic: so…..€425?
@Paraic: Fear of Death? Would you get a grip! It was a controlled descent due to cabin depressurisation not a hole in the aircraft! Not once during that flight was there a risk of fatality. The media are making this out to be much worse than it is, slow news week it would seem
@Jordan Dunne: Lots of people already have fear of flying before boarding. Do you think they were unfazed when there was a sudden and rapid decompression event, the oxygen masks popped down, they began bleeding from their ears and nose and shat their pants involuntarily? Not to mention the fact that rapid decompression has often been catastrophic to flights historically. The plane descended from 36,000ft to about 10,000 in mere seconds. Irrespective of whether it was in control of the pilot, it was terrifying for the passengers. You’re the one who needs to get a grip!
@Jordan Dunne: lol, have you ever been on a plane? Or met people? Somehow I really doubt the latter.
@Paraic: 36000 to 10000 feet in seconds ? Well thats just a blatant lie. Id say you must be terrified of flying.
De pressurisation is not unusual, and it is trained for by the crew – how frequest? there can one a day or one a week worldwide, in fact one study suggested two depressurisation a day based on the number of hours flown, but that data could be a little out of date, just it is not a rare event and almost all pass without incident or media coverage.
When it happens and an aircraft springs a leak, which essentially what depressurisation is, a few things happen.. as the internal air pressure falls owing to air leaking out, the oxygen masks will be ploy automatically, however the crew may deploy them in advance too. The crew try to descend around 12,000 feet where most people can breathe with no difficulty, and the aircraft could continue safely, and with no more need for oxgyen or masks, to it;s destination, as happens if this happens over water. However, unless there is a known reason for the depressurisation, the aircraft may choose to land.
We all know the effects on our ears of normal flight operations and depressurisation make this worse if sudden, Most decompressions on aircraft are slow enough so that the emergency descent operated by the crew avoids serious issues, but if the depressurisation is rapid enough then the issue becomes more serious.
One can think of a balloon which can leak air slowly and slowing deflating and the balloon that goes pop – both are burst but one is slow and the other destructive. This really does seem to have been a quite serious decompression if passengers were unfit to fly afterwards, even if just “playing it safe”.
We should hope they all recover with no lasting issues, but also not fear decompressisation as it is a well trained for procedure.
@Niall Ó Cofaigh: the Cabin pressure controller failed. The masks deployed automatically and pilots followed standard procedure by making a controlled rapid descent . Aircraft landed safely with some minor injuries. Not that big a deal
@Jordan Dunne: Is your real name Michael O Leary?
@Paraic: hehe you got me
think they continue by air ambulance
have your say