Coronavirus: vital to stop human-to-human spread in Wuhan, says China’s top expert as death toll hits 1,868

Outside Hubei, new confirmed cases of Covid-19 – the official name of the disease caused by the coronavirus – have dropped 14 days in a row, according to the National Health Commission, which also reported that 1,701 more patients had recovered on Monday.

The commission’s spokesman Mi Feng said on Tuesday that it was the first day since the outbreak’s peak that confirmed cases increased by less than 2,000. Excluding Hubei, the country’s new confirmed cases increased by less than 100.

The latest figures from Hubei took total cases in the province to 59,989 and deaths to 1,789. Of the Hubei totals for Monday, 1,600 new cases and 72 deaths were in the provincial capital of Wuhan, the Hubei health commission said.

‘Stopping human-to-human spread is key’

Zhong Nanshan, China’s top respiratory disease expert, said the situation in Wuhan, the epicentre of the outbreak, hinged on whether human-to-human transmission could be contained, which in turn depended on separating Covid-19 patients from those with seasonal influenza.

“How to separate Covid-19 patients from seasonal influenza patients, and how to separate healthy people from Covid-19 patients, and how to separate other patients from Covid-19 patients: if you don’t solve that problem, human-to-human transmissions will not stop,” Zhong told a briefing on Tuesday.

Only isolated cases were being found to have incubation periods longer than the average of two to seven days, said Zhong, whose research team have released a draft paper for peer review that was based on analysis of 1,099 cases in China. Among the 1,099 cases, only one had an incubation period longer than 24 days, and only 13 were longer than 14 days.