Kazakh authorities on Friday denied claims by the Chinese Embassy in Nur-Sultan that a new virus, deadlier than SARS-CoV-2, is would be spreading in several regions of the country.
It all started with a message from the Chinese Embassy in Nur-Sultan, the Kazakh capital, alerting its citizens on its WeChat platform that a new disease “with a mortality rate far higher than Covid-19 “, was spreading to several regions of Kazakhstan, including those of Atyrau, Aktobe and Shymkent.
According to the press release, which refers to "Kazakh pneumonia", this caused the death of 1,772 people in the first six months of 2020, including " 628 in June alone “.
Therefore, China has called on its nationals to be extremely vigilant and to avoid crowded places.
A report from the Chinese daily Global Times also adds that some Chinese experts have already called for awareness and measures to be put in place to prevent this virus from entering China (the two countries share a border). Note that for now, all cross-border buses and international flights are currently suspended in Kazakhstan, due to the coronavirus crisis.
The claims "Chinese media does not "correspond to reality “, assured the Kazakh Ministry of Health on Friday, in a press release, specifying that the country had nevertheless recorded a little more than 32,000 cases of pneumonia between June 29 and July 5, with 451 deaths . Public health officials in Kazakhstan have nevertheless declared that these are standard pneumonias.
Even so, Aizhan Esmagambetova, Kazakhstan's chief medical officer, indeed pointed out that this year's death toll from pneumonia is 50% higher than last year .
Luca Anceschi, senior lecturer in Central Asian studies at the University of Glasgow, told Newsweek that there was no evidence to suggest that the claims made in the Chinese media were true.
“There is no confirmation from Kazakh national sources to support reports that describe this strain of pneumonia as an entirely new virus. My feeling, he says, is that more time, better testing and perhaps a revision of Kazakhstan's reporting practices are definitely needed to determine if these pneumonia cases are in fact linked to COVID-19 infection. “.
Asked about the motivations of this Chinese statement, the expert said that it was difficult to speculate as the Sino-Kazakh relationship is complex.
Officially, the latest assessment of Covid-19 in this Central Asian country reports more than 57,000 cases of contamination and 264 deaths . In total, since the start of the pandemic, more than 12 million cases have been confirmed worldwide, according to Johns Hopkins University.
This Thursday, WHO Director General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus recalled that the virus was not under control in any region of the world, and that the pandemic continued to accelerate. “Over the past six weeks, the total number of cases has doubled “, he said.
