HONG KONG/BEIJING, April 5: Hong Kong reported 39 new infections and three deaths from a deadly respiratory virus on Saturday, and a top doctor in the battered Chinese region said its health care system was in crisis.
The latest figures took the total of confirmed cases of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in Hong Kong to 800, and the local death toll to 20, a government spokesman said.
The pneumonia-like disease, which may have originated in southern China, hit the city in March and has been spread around the world by air travellers.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has issued an unprecedented warning against travel to Hong Kong and Guangdong.
Malaysia reported its first likely death from SARS, which has now killed more than 80 people and infected over 2,500 worldwide. Singapore, with six fatalities, said it would keep its schools closed for several more days to allay public fears.
France confirmed its first two cases of SARS infection, two doctors who flew back together from Hanoi. An air hostess who travelled on the same flight is in hospital as a suspected case.
British health authorities said on Saturday a suspected case of SARS had been reported regarding a woman who returned to Britain from Singapore on March 25. It was the fourth suspected case reported in UK. The three others have been discharged from hospital.
In hard-hit Hong Kong, 10 health workers were among the 39 new SARS cases revealed on Saturday.
According to the Ming Pao newspaper, Dr Tse Chun Yan, a senior physician at one hospital, wrote in a memo to his staff: “The entire Hospital Authority is in crisis.”
Beijing, meanwhile, began sending its first daily reports on new SARS infections and deaths to the WHO, nearly five months after the first victim caught the virus in its southern province of Guangdong, which borders Hong Kong.
CHINESE REGRETS: China, which has seen 136,000 foreign tourists cancel visits and fears more economic fallout, issued a muted apology for its handling of the crisis so far, through Li Liming, director of the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention.
Mr Li told domestic media in Beijing on Friday: “Today we apologize here to all of you that our health departments did not have enough close cooperation with the media.”
“We did not make good use of our health team to help conduct mass science publicity which would have helped people grasp an understanding of the disease, enhance their ability to prevent the disease and be better aware of their own health,” Li said.
But it did not appear that the official regrets were intended for public consumption: foreign media were not invited to the news conference and his apology went unreported in the Chinese state media on Saturday.
In the Guangdong capital, Guangzhou, a team of WHO experts hunting for clues on the disease met provincial health officials and recovered victims of SARS, and travelled to Foshan, where the first case emerged in November.—AFP