Italy has just surpassed China for the most number of deaths related to coronavirus.
The total number of cases in the country rose to 41,035 on Thursday, which includes 5,322 new cases, the Italian Civil Protection Agency said at a news conference.
The number of deaths in Italy has reached 3,405 while the current number of deaths in China stands at 3,242, according to the World Health Organization.
According to Chinese medical experts helping the country deal with the crisis, the coronavirus measures in place in the hard-hit Lombardy region of northern Italy are “not strict enough.”
The situation in Lombardy right now “is similar to what we experienced two months ago in Wuhan, China, the epicenter of COVID-19,” the Chinese Red Cross vice president, Sun Shuopeng, said Thursday in a press conference in Milan, Italy.
“In the city of Wuhan after one month since the adoption of the lockdown policy, we see a decreasing trend from the peak of the disease,” Sun Shuopeng said.
He advised Italians to stop all “economic activities and cut the mobility of people.” Everyone should just stay at home, he added.
Meanwhile, President Trump said on Thursday that the antimalarial drug chloroquine and its analog hydroxychloroquine would soon be made available with a prescription to treat the novel coronavirus.
Early evidence from human cells suggests that chloroquine — which is used to treat malaria and autoimmune diseases — may have some activity against the novel coronavirus.
Doctors in China, the US and other countries have used the drug experimentally in COVID-19 patients, but there is not yet sufficient clinical evidence that it’s effective in humans.
The drug, generally considered to be safe for most patients, can have side effects including seizures, nausea, vomiting, deafness, vision changes and low blood pressure.
Some more context: When asked about chloroquine last month, Dr. Janet Diaz of the World Health Organization said “there is no proof that that is an effective treatment at this time. We recommend that therapeutics be tested under ethically approved clinical trials to show efficacy and safety.”
At the time, Diaz said the drugs that were being prioritized by WHO’s research and development efforts were antivirals.
Trump also mentioned an antiviral drug, remdesivir, which is the focus of clinical trials in China and the US.
Remdesivir is an experimental antiviral that appears to work against a range of very different virus families, including coronaviruses and Ebola.
The drug is already being tested at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in adults diagnosed with the novel coronavirus disease, according to the National Institutes of Health.
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