China has pledged to "conduct a thorough investigation" about the death of a doctor who has been praised by the people as a hero for warning against the outbreak of the new strain of the Coronavirus, despite the reprimand of the authorities.
On Friday, the National Oversight Commission, China´s top anti-corruption body, said it would send investigators to the central city of Wuhan, a hotbed of viral disease, to look into the circumstances surrounding the death of doctor Li Wenliang.
Lee, a 34-year-old ophthalmologist, died in a Wuhan hospital early Friday after he was infected with the new strain of the Coronavirus, according to the hospital in which he works.
Lee´s story triggered a wave of support on social media as he was fighting the disease that has so far killed more than 600 people and infected tens of thousands.
Li had reported to the government media that he had been reprimanded by the hospital administration and officials of the (Communist) Party after he alerted his colleagues to a group of pathological symptoms associated with an animal market in Wuhan.
Li initially believed that the disease was a new strain of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), a disease that caused hundreds of deaths across China during 2002 and 2003.
Lee has become a national symbol of people´s attempts to obtain answers to the authorities´ initial response to the spread of the Coronavirus.
The Wuhan government was criticized for what many considered a failure to early detection of the severity of the new disease, which led to more injuries between medical personnel and the population.
To date, 31,000, 161 infections and 636 deaths from the new strain of the Coronavirus have been reported across China by the end of Thursday, according to the National Health Commission. The disease has also spread to more than twenty other countries around the world.
Beijing has not released any data on the number of medical workers who have been infected with the new virus.
And he infected me last January after treating a patient with glaucoma without knowing that the patient was infected with corona virus.
Early Friday, Wuhan Central Hospital, where he was working for me, announced that he had died Friday morning local time.
This came after hours of confusion after the official media announced that he had died yesterday evening, Thursday.
The hospital said after midnight on Friday that Li was in critical condition. About three hours later, he confirmed his death. He said: "The overall efforts to save him have not succeeded. We deeply regret and feel sad about the loss."
China is "very confident and fully capable of defeating the disease," Chinese President Xi Jinping told his US counterpart Donald Trump in a phone call Friday, and Trump expressed his confidence that China was able to succeed in fighting the disease.
The quarantine was imposed for the third consecutive day on a cruise ship off the coast of Japan carrying thousands of people. The Japanese Ministry of Health announced that 41 people were infected with the Corona virus, including 21 Japanese, which brings the number of people infected with the disease on board the ship to 61.
On Thursday, Taiwan announced three additional cases of coronavirus, bringing the number of people infected with the disease in the country to 16.
