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On Saturday, mainland China reported 69 new cases, more than double the 33 reported a day earlier. Most of the locally transmitted cases – 46 out of 48 – were in Hebei.
State broadcaster CCTV reported on Sunday that all religious activities had been stopped temporarily in villages in Shijiazhuang, the provincial capital and epicentre of the Hebei outbreak.
but there was no evidence to support online rumours that the gatherings were the cause of the spread of the epidemic
The authorities also dismissed speculation that European and American priests had been preaching in the community, the report said.
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Coronavirus: Hebei province reports 120 new local cases in China’s biggest Covid-19 rise in months
Li said tighter prevention and better treatment of the virus was not only a public health issue, it affected China’s national security and social stability.
Monitoring and early warning, nucleic acid testing, isolation, medical treatment, contact tracing and emergency response mechanisms should be toughened to contain the virus, he said.
The Chinese government strictly controls all research into its origins, and a year on, World Health Organization (WHO) investigators have not been able to go to Wuhan to carry out tests at a seafood and poultry market in Wuhan, Hubei province, linked to initial cases.
01:15
Drone footage captures jaw-dropping traffic jam at the expressway toll stations in Beijing & Hebei
Chinese researchers have said strains of the virus could be traced to eight countries from four continents before the outbreak in Wuhan, suggesting the epidemic could have originated outside of China although other scientists have questioned such findings.
Researchers in a number of countries, including in Italy and France, are also taking another look at pneumonia deaths before December 2019 to see if Covid-19 was the cause.
Meanwhile, a study by the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention suggested that a large number of people that contracted the virus during the initial outbreak in Wuhan may have been missed or under-reported partly because asymptomatic cases were counted separately from confirmed cases, complicating reported totals.
The study indicated that over 4 per cent of the 11 million people in the city might have been exposed to the coronavirus, an estimate that equates to 10 times the 50,008 people officially recorded in mid-April.
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