Health authorities in China announced that steps to prevent the spread of coronary disease will be worsened • "It is becoming increasingly difficult to identify and treat the disease" • The death toll has risen to 56

• Woman in protective clothing in Wuhan city // Photo: IP

China's national health commission minister Ma Yawi said on Sunday that more and more draconian efforts would be taken to curb the spread of the corona virus and warned that the virus's ability to spread was strengthening over time.

"The human-to-human infection capability is improving over time and sources of infection are moving, people who are suffering from the virus but showing no symptoms have made identification and prevention of the disease more difficult," explained Shivay.

"We have not yet been able to understand the source of the disease and the infection and it is not yet clear the extent of the original virus mutations and its ability to pass from person to person. Since we are dealing with a new strain of the corona, we may have to close the means to deal with it," Shiawi warned.

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Authorities today announced a new set of unprecedented measures to tackle the outbreak, including a national ban on wildlife trafficking, suspension of inter-city buses in the country's southern districts, and stopping buses departing from Shanghai.

Concern: Deficiencies have led to the spread of the virus

But despite the serious measures that could hurt China's economy, signs are mounting that the Chinese government's response to the virus outbreak at its beginning was deficient and created difficulty coping with the spreading disease.

In an article in the British Guardian, a Chinese young woman visiting Wuhan's fish market, the epicenter of the virus, claims that four days have passed since people started getting sick before authorities started taking any steps.

While China made sure to update the world and published the genetic structure of the new virus, a move that surprised many with its transparency and openness, field doctors continued to send patients to their homes and made no efforts to find new infections, presumably because they believed the disease did not pass from person to person. The concern is that authorities' failure to mass-diagnose the disease, and the collapse of local hospitals, has largely helped the virus to spread.

Vaughan Senior High Street // Photo: Reuters

Meanwhile, media outlets in the United States reported tonight that a third patient was found for Corona's disease, Orange County, California. This is the second patient diagnosed with the disease in the state of California. The patient is reportedly a man who visited the outbreak center in Wuhan city.

In Hong Kong, the fear of the disease outbreak created a violent reaction as protesters set fire to a housing complex that city authorities have allocated for quarantine for patients with the Corona virus. In response to public outrage, the authorities banned the autonomy of the residents of the provinces where the outbreak began

A Beijing bus stop closed in Beijing following the Corona eruption // Photo: AP

Official data released today China shows that so far, the Corona virus, which severely and fatally affects the respiratory tract, has 1,975 of its inhabitants, while 56 people have died as a result of the virus. To date, around 2,000 people have been infected with the virus, most of them in China