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Coronavirus: US says Beijing will allow its health experts into China to help combat outbreak
- American public health agency also says US actions are ‘science based’ and are not an overreaction to the contagion
- Measures including a travel ban are aimed at ‘slowing the entry of the virus into the United States’, CDC says
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China has agreed to allow American health experts into the country to help in the effort to fight the coronavirus outbreak, US officials said on Monday as they pushed back against Beijing’s assertion that Washington has overreacted with its aggressive response to the crisis.
“China has accepted the United States’ offer to incorporate a group of experts into a World Health Organisation mission to China to learn more about and combat the virus,” White House spokesman Judd Deere said.
Earlier on Monday, a top official from the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention said the US government’s response to the coronavirus – which includes closing borders to visitors who have been in China – was “science based”.
Nancy Messonnier, director of the National Centre for Immunisation and Respiratory Diseases, said the measures were aimed at “slowing the entry of the virus into the United States”.
“These actions are science based and they are protecting the health and safety of all Americans,” she said, adding that “action now has the biggest potential to slow things down”.
Messonnier said that despite the low number of cases in the US – compared with more than 20,000 reported infections in China – CDC officials were “preparing as if this were the next pandemic” after the country’s last large-scale virus outbreak, the 2009 spread of the H1N1 flu.
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