Chinese officials sacked over coronavirus outbreak

Chinese President Xi Jingping has purged two senior Communist Party officials over the spread of the coronavirus.

Medical workers treat patients in the isolated intensive care unit at a hospital in Wuhan in central China’s Hubei province. Picture: AP

Chinese President Xi Jinping has purged the two most senior Communist Party officials in Hubei, the epicentre of the coronavirus, the spread of which local authorities have admitted was far higher than previously revealed.

Health authorities in Hubei ­announced on Thursday more than 14,840 new cases and 242 deaths in one day in the central Chinese province.

They said the almost 10-fold ­increase in the daily number of cases was the result of a broadening of the diagnostic criteria used to confirm cases of the officially named COVID-19.

University of Hong Kong professor Keiji Fukuda, a leading member of the World Health ­Organisation’s 2003 SARS team, welcomed the Hubei authority’s diagnostic change.

“The numbers are still going to provide an undercount (ie, the people who never go to a hospital or clinic will never get identified except in a research study) but are going to be closer to reality than a case definition, which relies on test results,” Professor Fukuda said.

The soaring new tally took the total number of confirmed cases to more than 60,000, with 1368 deaths.

Hours after the figures were released, China’s state-controlled media ­revealed that Hubei party secretary Jiang Chaoliang and Ma Guoqiang, the party secretary of Hubei’s capital, Wuhan, had been sacked. It is the most dramatic purge for bad performance, rather than corruption, of senior Chinese Communist Party officials during Mr Xi’s eight-year reign.

The latest developments in China’s health and political crisis came the day after its officials ­reported its lowest number of new coronavirus cases in two weeks, encouraging Beijing’s senior medical adviser to forecast that the outbreak might end by April.

Medical officials around the world have for weeks suspected the number of cases of COVID-19 — which has spread to at least 24 countries — is far higher than the official numbers because many ­patients were avoiding crowded hospitals, particularly in Hubei.

The new case definition will ­introduce a discontinuity with patterns based on the previous numbers “but if the timing of when a new case definition was adopted is clearly noted, it will not be a major problem,” Professor Fukuda said.

The change in definition comes as a WHO team led by Canadian epidemiologist Bruce Aylward ­visited Beijing to gather information on the virus to better co-ordinate the response to the global health emergency.

A spokesman at the WHO did not answer The Australian’s inquiries about how transparent the Chinese officials were being with the inspection team or whether they were consulted on the change.

 

Many in China believe the reporting change and the WHO team’s presence in Beijing were ­related.

“The revision is clearly a result of outside pressure,” a Beijing lawyer told The Australian.

Leading scientists are still convinced the true number of cases is being vastly underreported.

The director of the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis, Neil Ferguson, said he believed only 5 per cent of cases were being detected in China.

“I think we’re in the early ­phases of a global pandemic at the ­moment,” Professor Ferguson told the BBC.

The diagnostic criteria in Hubei was widened to take in cases that had been confirmed from CT scans, not just those confirmed by nucleic acid testing. It was reported that the majority of the new 14,840 cases were those confirmed via CT scan.

On Thursday, the cruise ship Westerdam, carrying 2200 passengers and crew mostly from Australia, the US and Britain, was finally allowed to moor off the coast of Cambodia’s Sihanoukville, a notorious mecca for Chinese gamblers and organised crime. Four Asian countries had banned it from docking in the past week.