A Chinese tourist who was holiday in Bali has tested positive to coronavirus as the number of new cases rises sharply by more than 14,000 in the past day.
On Wednesday night, the Jakarta Post reported the Chinese national visited the popular Indonesian tourist hotspot on January 22 and returned to Shanghai on a Garuda Indonesia flight on January 28.
According to a Weibo post verified by the Post, the Huainan Centre for Disease Control said “the patient was found to have been infected with the virus that causes the disease” on February 5.
The latest case comes as central Hubei province’s health commission said a further 14,840 cases were detected, taking the total in the province to 48,206 and the total number of cases worldwide to 60,239.
Another 93 people have tested positive to the virus outside the region.
And the total number of deaths has risen by 242 to 1365, with only two recorded outside China, one in the Philippines and one in Hong Kong.
The commission said that it had begun including cases diagnosed through new clinical methods from Thursday.
A realtime data map from JHU (see above), which is collating data from the World Health Organisation and several other official sources including the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), shows the number of people testing positive rose from 45,212 [on Thursday morning] to 60,239.
The grim new tally came a day after China had reported its lowest number of new coronavirus cases in two weeks, bolstering a forecast by Beijing’s senior medical adviser for the outbreak there to end by April.
But the 2015 new confirmed cases reported in mainland China on Wednesday was dwarfed by the 14,840 new cases reported in Hubei alone on Thursday, when provincial officials said they had adopted a new methodology for counting infections.
It was not immediately clear how the new methodology affected the results, nor why the death toll rose so sharply.
Federal Government considers extending travel
Meanwhile, the travel ban preventing Chinese visitors and students from entering Australia may be extended as part of the government’s response to the coronavirus, even as financial pressures in the economy mount.
“The current ban extends to this weekend and we will be consider those issues on the best medical advice,” Prime Minister Scott Morrison said on Thursday, ahead of a meeting of the national security committee.
The virus, now officially known as COVID-19, on top of this summer’s bushfires and a long-running drought, is having huge financial impact on the economy, and may even see the government forgo its much-promised budget surplus.
The ramifications are particularly bad for Australia’s university sector, which has 68,000 Chinese foreign students locked out because of the travel ban, but the tourism and hospitality sectors also are suffering.
“The timing for Australia is unique as opposed to the US or Canada, because of course we are at the start of our (education) year, so the timing is probably the worst possible outcome,” Vicki Thomson, chief executive of the Group of Eight universities, told ABC radio.
-with AAP
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