The Chinese city of Wuhan’s new Communist Party secretary Wang Zhonglin has said that local leaders must provide accurate figures of coronavirus infections.
Inspectors scoured the locked-down city ahead of Wednesday’s midnight deadline in an effort to check and locate each infected person. Wang said that anyone infected must be quarantined to prevent person-to-person transmission.
“Take it seriously. Life matters,” Wang said in remarks published on the Hubei province government website. “[T]he district leaders will be held responsible.”
Wang replaced Wuhan’s previous party secretary Ma Guoqiang last week.
More than 75,000 people globally have been infected with Covid-19, whilst over 2,100 have died from the disease. On Thursday, the death toll in China surpassed 2,118, though the rate appears to have slowed.
Across Hubei province, over 60 million people have been put under “self-quarantine” orders in their own homes, with all but essential transport halted.
Meanwhile, at a regional meeting in Laos, China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi said that the outbreak was “controllable and curable.”
“China’s forceful action has contained the spread of the virus inside China and also the spread of the virus to other parts of the world,” he told the ASEAN summit.
Additional reporting: Rachel Wong.
