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‘Unknown pneumonia’ deadlier than coronavirus sweeping Kazakhstan

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Web Desk
Web Desk
News Stories Posted by ARY News Digital Team

The Chinese embassy in Kazakhstan has warned of a deadly “unknown pneumonia” after the former Soviet republic reported a spike in pneumonia cases since June.

The pneumonia outbreak ‘is more deadly than the novel coronavirus’ before the leading disease-control expert challenged the country’s own warning on state TV.

Wu Zunyou, chief epidemiologist of China’s CDC, said tonight that he believed the ‘unknown pneumonia’ was highly likely to be Covid-19 ‘from an epidemiological perspective’.
He said he had noticed the news and read through relevant information online.

Wu noted that it would be unlikely for a new infectious respiratory disease to break out in summer.

He also said that the available mortality rate of the ‘unknown pneumonia’ was similar to that of Covid-19.

The expert suspected that the coronavirus outbreak had put great pressure on the local medical workers, leading them to unable to diagnose many patients in time.

Professor Lawrence Young, a virologist and oncologist at University of Warwick, told MailOnline it was ‘difficult to believe’ the pneumonia is not related to Covid-19.

Kazakhstan’s Health Ministry said it has recorded more than 32,000 cases of pneumonia between June 29 and July 5 alone, along with 451 deaths.

By comparison, the official number of coronavirus cases in Kazakhstan stands at 53,021, with 296 confirmed deaths from the disease.

Pictures and video showed people queuing outside a morgue in the largest city Almaty to collect the bodies of relatives.

Some 28,000 pneumonia patients with negative coronavirus tests are hospitalised in Kazakhstan, deputy health minister Azhar Giniyat said.

The Kazakh health ministry insisted on Friday the Chinese pneumonia claim was ‘not true’ despite an apparent surge in cases not confirmed as coronavirus.

And the ex-Soviet state has gone back into lockdown with the president issuing a ‘don’t panic’ message while also demanding strict adherence to lockdown rules.

The Chinese embassy stated that Kazakhstan saw 1,772 pneumonia deaths in the first half of the year, including 628 in June, some of whom were Chinese nationals.

The embassy’s statement originally referred to ‘Kazakhstan pneumonia’ but this wording was later changed to ‘non-COVID pneumonia’.

On Tuesday, state news agency Kazinform said the number of pneumonia cases ‘increased 2.2 times in June as compared to the same period of 2019’.

Kazakhstan and other Central Asian states have been accused in recent weeks of underplaying the scale of their second wave of cases by classifying many as pneumonia.

Lack of good quality testing kits is widely cited as a reason for underreporting.

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