No new domestic coronavirus cases were confirmed in China for the second consecutive day even as three more fatalities have been reported, taking the death toll in the country to 3,248, the Chinese health authority said on Friday.
No new domestically transmitted cases of the novel coronavirus disease were reported on the Chinese mainland on Thursday, the National Health Commission (NHC) said.
Meanwhile, Beijing accused US President Donald Trump on Friday of trying to “shift the blame” for the global coronavirus pandemic in an escalating row between the two powers.
Trump charged on Thursday that the world is “paying a big price” for China’s lack of transparency on
the outbreak when it emerged in the central city of Wuhan late last year.
China has been criticised for suppressing information and punishing whistleblowers during the early stages of the contagion, which an AFP tally shows has now killed nearly 10,000 people with more than 232,000 cases worldwide.
“Some people on the US side are trying to stigmatise China’s fight against the epidemic, and shift the blame onto China,” foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said.
Trump has defended his description of the virus, saying it was “not racist at all”.
China achieved a new milestone in its efforts to contain the spread of the COVID-19 in the last three months by reporting zero cases on Wednesday.
However, the NHC said on Friday that it received reports of 39 newly confirmed COVID-19 cases on the Chinese mainland on Thursday, all of which were imported taking the total of confirmed cases of people coming from abroad to 228.
Of them, 14 were reported in the Guangdong Province, eight in Shanghai, six in Beijing and three in the Fujian Province. Provincial-level regions of Tianjin, Liaoning, Heilongjiang, Zhejiang, Shandong, Guangxi, Sichuan and Gansu each reported one case.