Death Toll In China’s Coronavirus Epidemic Jumps To Over 1600 

BEIJING: Death toll in China's coronavirus has gone up to 1,631 with 143 new fatalities reported from all over the country, Chinese health officials said on Saturday.

Hubei Province, the epicentre of the novel coronavirus outbreak, reported 2,420 new confirmed cases and 139 new deaths on Friday, China's National Health Commission said.

Two deaths were reported from Henan and one each from Beijing and Chongqing as the overall death toll reached 143 with 2,641 new confirmed cases of the infection being reported from 31 provincial-level regions, the Commission said.

The number of new cases included 1,138 clinically diagnosed cases, which have been seen as confirmed cases, it said.

The latest report brought the total confirmed cases in Hubei province to 54,406 cases. The total number of cases in China have gone up to 67,535.

On Friday, the Chinese government had highlighted the continued drop of coronavirus disease, officially termed by the WHO as COVID-19, all over the country except in Hubei province.

Meanwhile, Chinese President Xi Jinping has called for the use of digital technology such as big data, artificial intelligence and cloud computing to better support epidemic monitoring and analysis, virus tracing, prevention and treatment, and resource allocation.

His call came amid deployment of robots in hospitals in Wuhan treating the virus patients to supply and other materials.

More than 580 cases have been confirmed outside mainland China and three deaths, one each in the Philippines and Hong Kong and now a Japanese woman in her 80s. Health officials are investigating how she got infected. (PTI)

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