Kazakhstan imposed a second lockout this week to curb the coronavirus pandemic.
Shanghai:
Kazakhstan on Friday dismissed the Chinese Embassy’s warning to its citizens to guard against an epidemic of pneumonia in the Central Asian nation, which it described as more deadly than the coronavirus, as inaccurate.
In a statement released Thursday evening on its official WeChat account, the Chinese Embassy reported a “significant increase” in the number of cases in the Kazakh cities of Atyrau, Aktobe and Shymkent since mid-June.
On Friday, however, Kazakhstan’s health ministry called Chinese media reports based on the embassy statement “false news”.
The ministry said its number of bacterial, fungal and viral pneumonia infections, which also included cases of unclear causes, was within guidelines of the World Health Organization.
“The information published by some Chinese media concerning a new type of pneumonia in Kazakhstan is incorrect,” the ministry said.
Kazakhstan, which imposed a second lockdown this week to control the pandemic, has nearly 55,000 COVID-19 infections, including 264 deaths. The number of new cases increased Thursday to a daily record of 1,962.
The state-run Kazinform news agency said on Tuesday that the number of pneumonia cases “had increased 2.2 times in June compared to the same period in 2019”.
In its statement, the Chinese Embassy said that pneumonia in Kazakhstan killed 1,772 people in the first half of the year, with 628 deaths in June, including Chinese citizens.
“The death rate from the disease is much higher than that from pneumonia caused by the new coronavirus,” the statement said.
It is not known whether the penumonia to which it refers was caused by a virus linked to the coronavirus or to a different strain.
The Kazakhstan Ministry of Health and other health facilities are carrying out a “comparative study”, but no conclusions have yet been drawn, the embassy added.
The Chinese People’s Daily tabloid Global Times tabloid said the Kazakh foreign ministry “did not respond to questions regarding the warning from the Chinese Embassy.”
(With the exception of the title, this story was not edited by GalacticGaming staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
