People age 60 and over account for 30 percent of Chinese coronavirus infections in southern China’s Guangdong province currently, China’s state-run Global Times reported Friday.
“The elderly and children account for more infected people in the latest COVID-19 [Chinese coronavirus] outbreak in South China’s Guangdong Province, among whom around 30 percent are over 60 years old, and 13 percent are under 14 years old,” the newspaper reported June 11, citing local health officials. Guangdong reported 140 cases of the Chinese coronavirus as of June 10.
“The number of infected people in this epidemic is high among the elderly and children. The oldest is 92 years old and the youngest is 1 year old,” Xu Qingfeng, the deputy director of Guangdong’s provincial health commission, told reporters at a press briefing June 11.
Roughly 10-12 percent of coronavirus patients in Guangdong’s capital, Guangzhou, “are critically ill,” Guan Xiangdong, a medical specialist working with Guangdong’s coronavirus response team, told the state-run China Central Television (CCTV) on June 10.
“The proportion is higher than in the epidemic in Wuhan, and the following 20 regional clusters that took place across China, in which the proportion was usually 2-3 percent, 5-8 percent or 8-10 percent in a few areas,” Guan told CCTV.
Wuhan is the capital of China’s central Hubei province and was the epicenter of the Chinese coronavirus pandemic. The disease was first detected in the city as early as fall 2019.
Medical experts and governments worldwide have intensified demands for an impartial probe into the origins of the Chinese coronavirus in Wuhan in recent weeks after new evidence emerged supporting the theory that the virus may have escaped the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a Chinese state-run laboratory that studies coronaviruses in bats. The World Health Organization (W.H.O.) sent an expert panel to Wuhan earlier this year to investigate the Chinese coronavirus’s origins and concluded in a summary report it was “extremely unlikely” the virus leaked from a laboratory but found no evidence of any animal reservoir of the disease.
The Chinese Communist Party heavily censored the sites and data the W.H.O. was allowed access to during the long-delayed visit, causing international medical experts to question the organization’s probe as lacking the impartiality and sufficient data necessary to draw an accurate conclusion.
Police in the Chaonan district of Shantou, a city in Guangdong, arrested two people in recent days for questioning the Guangdong government’s official data on the province’s latest Chinese coronavirus outbreak, Radio Free Asia (RFA) revealed June 10, citing a report by a local newspaper.
“The Shantou Daily newspaper reported that two men were held recently under administrative detention for ‘rumor-mongering’ about the pandemic,” the U.S. government-funded RFA relayed.
“Chaonan police investigated and dealt with two rumors involving the pandemic, and the two men involved were administratively detained by the public security bureau in accordance with the law,” the Shantou Daily reported.
“One of them, surnamed Zhuang, was detained on June 1 for making ‘inappropriate comments’ on the social media platform WeChat, and held for five days for ‘spreading rumors and disrupting public order,'” according to the newspaper. “Another WeChat user surnamed Zhou was detained on June 5 for saying he had tested positive for COVID-19 [Chinese coronavirus] and sentenced to 10 days’ administrative detention.”
“You’re not allowed to tell the truth in this pandemic. If you do, and someone retweets it online, you’re finished,” a Beijing resident surnamed Liu told RFA on Thursday. “This goes to show how afraid the government is of the truth; it’s very strict now.”