AUSTRALIA and Saudi Arabia have banned people from Mainland China from entering their countries as a way of preparing their countries against the spread of Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19).
With Saudi Arabia popular among global pilgrims, Saudis have barred not only visitors from China but non-religious tourists.
According to the BBC, Iit is not clear if the Hajj pilgrimage, which begins in July this year, will be affected.
Australia will extend a travel ban on foreigners arriving from China by at least another week, Morrison said, although there was as yet no need to stop mass gatherings.
There is every sign the world is about to be gripped by a pandemic of coronavirus, Prime Minister Scott Morrison warned, as Australia kicked off emergency measures to curb the spread of the disease.
“The advice we have received today is…there is every indication that the world will soon enter a pandemic phase of the coronavirus,” Morrison told a televised news conference in Canberra, the capital.
“As a result we have agreed today and initiated the…coronavirus emergency response plan,” he added.
In Australia, the Victorian health minister Jenny Mikakos says hospitals have reported racism toward both medical staff and patients as fears of coronavirus grow.
Mikakos told reporters at the Royal Children’s hospital in Melbourne on Thursday:
“Fear and anxiety around this coronavirus is not an excuse for racist behaviour. We will not tolerate it here in our public hospitals. People cannot pick and choose the doctors and nurses that attend to them.”
The emergency response plans says impact of the outbreak will be determined by:
- the clinical severity of the outbreak (how severe cases are, and many people need to be hospitalised)
- its transmissibility (how easily it is spread, currently it has a preliminary reproduction number of 1.4 to 2.5)
- the capacity of the health system to treat infected patients
- the effectiveness of interventions to treat the illness or stop it spreading
About 40 countries have been infected with the death toll now over 2800 against over 33 000 recoveries and 80 000 infections.