Chinese Foreign Minister says Pompeo is creating 'fake news' to smear Beijing over virus response

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian is pictured at a media briefing in Beijing, on April 8. Greg Baker/AFP/Getty Images

China's Foreign Ministry has accused US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo of “making up all sorts of fake news” to smear China and damage the country's international relations.

Zhao’s comments come after Pompeo said on Wednesday that “Beijing claimed for months that it reported the outbreak of the virus to the WHO. Now we know that’s not true, too.”

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo speaks during a news conference at the State Department in Washington on July 8. Tom Brenner/Pool/AFP/Getty Images

Pompeo also said China's ruling Communist Party "has an enormous credibility problem, They failed to tell the world the truth about this virus, and now hundreds of thousands of peoples all across the world are dead.”

Zhao said that China informed WHO of the latest information about the virus outbreak at the earliest possible opportunity.

He also urged Pompeo to “correct his mistakes," and "stop spreading political viruses before he becomes a laughing stock of the international community.”

China recorded nine new coronavirus cases on Wednesday, the country's National Health Commission (NHC) said.

This was the ninth consecutive day in which mainland China only record a single-digit number of cases.

Out of the new cases, three were reported in Liaoning, three in Shanghai, two in Guangdong and one in Sichuan, according to the NHC. 

There were no new cases reported in Beijing on Wednesday for the third day in row. The Chinese capital was forced into a partial lockdown last month when a cluster of new cases linked to a wholesale food market emerged.

Six new asymptomatic cases were also registered in the country, the NHC said. A total of 112 asymptomatic patients are still under medical observation.

Authorities take food to residents in a locked-down public housing estate in Melbourne, Australia, on July 9. William West/AFP/Getty Images

The Australian state of Victoria recorded 165 new coronavirus cases on Wednesday, the state's health department announced today.

Of the new cases, 30 have been linked to known outbreaks -- while 135 remain under investigation, the department said.

The announcement came just hours after Melbourne, Australia's second-largest city and the state capital, went into lockdown. The state border with neighbouring New South Wales has also been shut to stop the virus from spreading further.

Victoria has had 3,098 Covid-19 cases with 22 related deaths since the pandemic began.

New South Wales recorded 13 new cases on Wednesday, the state's Premier Gladys Berejiklian said Thursday.

From English pubs to the Spanish seaside, local lockdowns are cropping up all over the world as countries ease restrictions only to encounter new coronavirus outbreaks.

After months of closures, governments are eager to reopen schools and businesses to allow people to get on with their lives. But fresh clusters of infection have forced leaders to reimpose restrictions in some hotspots -- even as rules are eased elsewhere in the same country.

Beijing re-entered a partial lockdown in mid-June after a new coronavirus outbreak linked to a food market in the Chinese capital, while at least 24 states in the US are pausing or rolling back their reopenings as cases accelerate, amid fears that earlier restrictions were relaxed too fast.

The threshold for imposing new lockdowns -- as well as their size and scope -- varies dramatically between countries, from a single building in Italy, to several Rwandan villages, to a community of 200,000 in Spain's northeast and a coastal area of 70,000 in its northwest, to the whole of Israel.

There are hopes this approach could minimize the economic damage of large-scale shutdowns. In Portugal, for example, 19 boroughs on the outskirts of Lisbon have shut down, while the capital's downtown area has continued its reopening, along with the rest of the country.

Read more:

A large bottle of hand sanitizer near a pool in Spring Township, Pennsylvania, on June 13. Ben Hasty/MediaNews Group/Reading Eagle/Getty Images

The US Food and Drug Administration has added more types of hand sanitizer to its growing list of products that are either confirmed or potentially contaminated with toxic methanol.

More than two dozen hand sanitizer products sold by Mexico-based 4E Global -- many carrying the Blumen label -- contain high levels of methanol and have been recommended for recall, the agency said.

The FDA said it has seen an increase in products containing ethanol, also known as ethyl alcohol, that tested positive for potentially poisonous methanol contamination.

Methanol can be life-threatening if ingested and toxic if absorbed through the skin. States have also reported cases of blindness, hospitalizations and deaths in adults and children after drinking hand sanitizer products tainted with methanol, the FDA said.

Methanol, or wood alcohol as it’s often known, is used in antifreeze and fuel production. Exposure can also cause nausea, headaches, dizziness, agitation, amnesia, coma and seizures, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The CDC advises people to frequently wash their hands with soap and water to avoid contracting the novel coronavirus. If soap and water are not available, the CDC recommends using an alcohol-based hand sanitizer that contains at least 60% ethanol.

The FDA is urging consumers to check their hand sanitizers to find out if they are on the list of bad products posted on the agency's website and to report any adverse events or quality problems.

Cloth masks made by Fort Bend County Jail inmates in Richmond, Texas. Yi-Chin Lee/Houston Chronicle via AP

Cloth masks are better than nothing at protecting wearers and the people around them from disease, but they are not equivalent to medical-grade masks and shouldn’t be recommended for health care workers, researchers said Wednesday.

The researchers, from the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, said their results showed cloth versions don’t work as well.

 “In 2015, we conducted a randomized controlled trial to compare the efficacy of cloth masks with that of medical masks and controls (standard practice) among healthcare workers in Vietnam,” Dr. Abrar Chughtai, an epidemiologist, and colleagues wrote in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases. They checked the workers for influenza-like illnesses, which include a range of respiratory infections.

 The team also reviewed 19 other studies of masks and found the fabric used is important.

The researchers said that for coronavirus, all frontline health care workers should wear medical masks or N95 respirators.  

Authorities in India have recorded more than 100,000 cases of Covid-19 in the last five days, according to figures released by the country’s health ministry.

The ministry announced Thursday it had identified 24,879 new cases in a single 24-hour period -- India's highest in a single day since the pandemic began.

A total of 767,296 cases have now been identified in the country. More than 476,000 people have recovered, while 21,129 have died after contracting it.

A steady rise: The total number of daily new infections has been steadily rising in India, with the country registering more than 20,000 new coronavirus cases daily in the past week.

On Monday, India surpassed Russia to become the world's third-worst hit nation. Only the US and Brazil have identified more cases.

A total of 3,054,699 cases of coronavirus have been identified in the United States since the pandemic began, according to Johns Hopkins University's tally. At least 132,300 people have died in the country after contracting the virus. 

On Wednesday, Johns Hopkins reported 58,601 new cases and 820 deaths. 

The totals include cases from all 50 states, the District of Columbia and other US territories, as well as repatriated cases. 

Track cases in the US here:

Five months into a still-raging pandemic that has killed more than 130,000 Americans, simmering tensions between President Donald Trump and the health experts who staff his government have escalated from private griping to open dispute.

The result, people at those agencies say, is a new sense of demoralization as they continue their attempts to fight a once-in-a-generation health crisis while simultaneously navigating the whims of a President who has shown little interest or understanding of their work.

That Trump does not trust nor follow the advice of experts such as Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious disease specialist, is hardly new. The President has not attended a meeting of his coronavirus task force in months and recently its sessions have been held outside the White House, including on Wednesday at the headquarters of the Department of Education. Fauci was told to participate in the meeting remotely by videoconference, preventing him from participating in a midday task force press briefing.

White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said later it's a "decision for the task force" who appears at coronavirus briefings. Asked if the President still has confidence in Fauci, McEnany said Trump "has confidence in the conclusions of our medical experts."

Still, the President has complained to aides in meetings for months that Fauci's television appearances -- which have been sharply curtailed by the White House -- often seem to contradict his own message. As early as March, Trump was growing frustrated that Fauci's forecasts for the virus seemed less optimistic than his own, but largely avoided public rebukes.

At the same time, many of Trump's aides have viewed the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention with deep skepticism for months, believing its role in early testing missteps to have been a critical failure and viewing more recent leaks of draft guidance from the agency as attempts to circumvent the White House.

Yet as cases surge across the country and Trump's handling of the crisis causes his reelection prospects to dim, he is taking his quarrels with Fauci and the CDC public in striking new fashion.

Read more: