China ADMITS it was too slow to react to coronavirus outbreak which has killed at least 213 peopl

China has admitted it was too slow to react to the coronavirus outbreak which has sparked a global panic and left at least 213 people dead - amid claims that Beijing could be covering up a higher death toll. 

The secretary of the ruling Communist party in Wuhan said the virus's impact on the world 'would have been less' if measures had been taken sooner. 

The killer virus has spread around the world with the first cases in Britain confirmed today and governments scrambling to close their borders and retrieve their worried citizens from Wuhan.   

China has since imposed a drastic quarantine on Wuhan, where the virus is believed to have jumped from wild animals at a city market and infected humans.  
 

Officials today raised the death toll to 213 with nearly 10,000 people infected, but there are fears that the official figures are 'way too low' - sparking claims of a cover-up. 

Crematorium workers in the city claim that bodies are being sent from hospitals without being added to the official record.  

William Yang, an East Asia reporter for news site Deutsche Welle, said there were 'reasons to remain sceptical about what China has been sharing with the world'. 

'While they have been more transparent about certain things related to the virus, they continue to be sketchy and unreliable in other aspects,' Yang said. 

Hong Kong-based news outlet Initium spoke to workers on the mainland who said bodies were being sent for cremation without being properly identified, he said.

'This means there are patients who died from the virus, but were not added to the official record,' Yang suggested.  

China has taken extreme steps to stop the spread of the virus, including a quarantine of more than 50million people in Wuhan and the surrounding Hubei province.

Few governments could attempt such a feat but the quarantine is made possible by the ruling Communist Party's extensive controls on society. 

Wuhan mayor Zhou Xianwang said today that the task of containing the virus remains 'severe and complex' with the number of cases continuing to swell. 

Nonetheless the Chinese ambassador in Geneva today said there was no need for 'unnecessary panic' or 'excessive measures'.  

The death toll was hiked on Friday to 213 after 43 new deaths, all but one in Hubei. Most deaths have been elderly people.

China's National Health Commission also said Friday that 1,982 new cases had been confirmed, bringing the total to 9,692.

That exceeds the 8,096 cases from SARS, a similar outbreak that spread to more than two dozen countries in 2002-03 and killed 774 people.

Another 102,000 people are under medical observation in China with possible coronavirus symptoms.





MailOnline