Coronavirus patients in Wuhan spit at doctors to spread disease

A South African teacher trapped in Wuhan, China has revealed that coronavirus patients in the coronavirus epicenter deliberately spit at health care workers to spread the highly contagious respiratory virus. Her explosive claims come amid the coronavirus scare that has taken over several parts of the world in recent weeks.

“I’ve heard shocking stories about infected people going out of their way to contaminate others by taking off their masks and spitting in doctors’ faces,” revealed the teacher, Jessica Bailing. “I saw one video of a man spitting on all of the buttons in an apartment elevator,” she added.

As the situation in Wuhan gets worse by the day, Bailing is now afraid to leave their home, worrying she might contract the deadly disease. “I covered myself from head-to-toe with gloves on my hands, glasses to cover my eyes and of course, my mask,” she said.

In Wuhan alone, figures show that cases of coronavirus have tripled in just three days. 6,100 have already been infected with the virus since the outbreak started a month ago, 133 of which have already died. However, leading scientists believe that the actual number of patients infected with coronavirus is far greater than the official toll.

Since coronavirus can be easily spread from one person to another through a sneeze or cough, the World Health Organization (WHO) considers this strain as highly contagious. The first cases of coronavirus were from China, particularly people connected to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan.

Today, the outbreak is already bigger than the SARS epidemic that infected at least 5,327 people around the world in 2003. On Wednesday, China’s National Health Commission said this could even get worse in the next 10 days. Aside from China, several other countries already have confirmed cases of the virus, including South Korea, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Canada, France, Finland, and the U.S.

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WHO postpones decision on declaring coronavirus as global health emergency

World Health Organisation (WHO) on Wednesday postponed taking a decision on whether the mysterious coronavirus that killed at least 17 people and sickened hundreds of others in China a global health emergency.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said physicians need more information and asked the committee which he is leading, which held an emergency meeting in Geneva, Switzerland on Wednesday to reconvene on Thursday.

Tedros told roughly 150 reporters on a conference call that was delayed for almost two hours while the committee met that “today, there was an excellent discussion during the committee meeting, but it was also clear that to proceed, we need more information.”

Tedros said the emergency committee on Wednesday was split on whether to designate the illness a global health emergency, noting that “WHO has researchers in China collecting data.

“The decision about whether or not to declare a public health emergency of international concern is one I take extremely seriously, and one I am only prepared to make with appropriate consideration of all the evidence.”

Chinese authorities said many of the patients with the new illness, (Coronavirus) had come into contact with seafood and meat markets, suggesting the virus is spreading from animals to people.

WHO physicians said they found evidence of human-to-human transmission within close contacts, citing family members, and within a health-care environment and that the virus was stable and not showing any kind of unusual activity.

WHO defines a global health emergency, also known as a Public Health Emergency of International Concern, as an “extraordinary event” that is “serious, unusual or unexpected.”

The Coronavirus that emerged from Wuhan, China, had spread throughout Asia, infecting more than 540 people in China, Thailand, Taiwan, Japan and the Republic of Korea, according to WHO and Chinese state media.

The U.S. had also confirmed its first case on Tuesday, a Washington state man who was travelling in China, the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, said.

Meanwhile, Lawrence Gostin, a professor and faculty director of the O’Neill Institute for National & Global Health Law at Georgetown University, said “WHO does not enact emergencies easily. The international health agency only applied the emergency designation five times since the rules were implemented in mid-2000.

“The last time WHO declared a global health emergency was in 2019 for the Ebola outbreak in eastern Congo that killed more than 2,000 people.

“The agency also declared global emergencies for the 2016 Zika virus, the 2009 H1N1 swine flu and the 2014 polio and Ebola outbreaks.”

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