A new video appears to show doctors collapsing in a hospital in China as the deadly coronavirus mutates and continues to spread.
Terrifying videos of Contagion-like scenes appear to show people infected with coronavirus being taken in boxes and tubes, while doctors collapse in the middle of a hospital.
A Chinese reporter posted a video to Twitter showing a patient being wheeled from an airport in a large container.
In another posted earlier this week by Radio Free Asia Chinese, a patient appears to be sealed in a tube as they are removed from an ambulance in Huizhou, a city in the southern Guangdong province.
Meanwhile, another video shows doctors appearing to collapse in a hospital in Wuhan, reportedly related to the virus.
A patient in the US is being kept in a 6m containment room and being treated by a robot with a stethoscope so doctors don’t come in contact with the virus.
China says the virus is adapting and mutating, making it difficult to get under control.
The country is locking down more cities, including its famous The Forbidden City, as the deadly infection spreads rapidly.
The respiratory virus has claimed 25 lives since emerging from a seafood and animal market in the central city of Wuhan.
There have been 24 deaths in Wuhan, the “epicentre of this outbreak”, and one in Beijing, Australia’s chief medical officer Professor Brendan Murphy confirmed on Friday afternoon.
“They have pretty much been in elderly people or people with other medical conditions,” he said.
“People who are generally frail – that’s the word we’re getting from China.
“Approximately 25 per cent of people who contract this infection and who have been detected and diagnosed seem to get a more severe illness, but we do know, or we do suspect, that there are a number of additional cases that are so mild that they haven’t come to attention and been detected or diagnosed at the moment.”
No cases have been confirmed in Australia.
Prof Murphy said there are now 844 cases worldwide including 14 outside of China detected as far away as the United States.
Fourteen people in the UK are being tested. Five of those have been confirmed negative and nine are still waiting for results.
It’s understood five are from Scotland and another has been tested at the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
“The risk to the Scottish public remains low,” a Scottish government spokesman said.
Despite China locking down some 20 million people, the World Health Organisation said the disease did not yet constitute a global health emergency.
The new virus has caused alarm because of its similarity to SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome), which killed nearly 650 people across mainland China and Hong Kong in 2002-2003.
But after two days of talks to determine the level of global concern, the World Health Organisation yesterday stopped short of declaring a so-called a public health emergency of international concern — declaration used for the gravest epidemics.
“This is an emergency in China, but it has not yet become a global health emergency,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters in Geneva.
WHO had postponed its decision by a day, after Chinese authorities announced unprecedented measures to rein in the spread of the virus.
