Doctor Dies from Chinese Coronavirus as Toll Hits 41

A physician who had been at the front line in battling the coronavirus outbreak in a hospital in China's Hubei Xinhua Hospital has died from the new virus, Chinese-state media confirms.

Liang Wudong was at the Hubei Xinhua Hospital in Hubei province, where the outbreak of the novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) began, CTGN said. He was 62, it added.

Liang Wudong, a doctor at Hubei Xinhua Hospital who had been at the front line of the #CoronavirusOutbreak battle in Wuhan, dies from the virus at age 62. pic.twitter.com/W6RmzLnioS — CGTN (@CGTNOfficial) January 25, 2020

The Chinese government announced on Saturday that the cases surged to almost 1,300 - the bulk of which are in Hubei.

Health officials inside the province also found out that 15 new deaths happened in Wuhan, bringing the total quantity of fatalities to 41 because the outbreak began.

The sickness has unfolded to 30 provinces, autonomous regions, and municipalities in China. The deadly new virus has reached parts of Asia, Europe, and the United States.

Wuhan and 13 different towns in Hubei have been locked down in an unparalleled quarantine attempt aimed at containing the deadly respiration contagion, which has spread to several different countries.

Coronaviruses, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), are known to cause respiratory illnesses ranging from the common cold to more severe diseases such as Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS-CoV) and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS).

These diseases could be transmitted between animal and human, or from human to human, WHO said.

ALSO READ: Here's What We Know So Far About China's Coronavirus

Medical Staff Struggles to Cope

Liang's death underscored the struggle faced by medical staff in the country as posts showing exhaused workers struglling to cope circulates social - including those in WeChat. 

The Wuhan Municipal Health Commission (WMHC) acknowledged in a statement that there had been a scarcity of beds and long outpatient queues inside the metropolis.

WMHC, in response, totally used seven hospitals for the patients. It added that more 3,000 beds would be made available for suspected and confirmed cases of the virus.

Medical employees in Wuhan described to Chinese state media CCTV an incredibly extreme environment, in which they must balance managing the overload of sufferers and suspected patients while also retaining themselves safe.

Wang Jun, a nurse at Jinyintan Hospital, told CCTV one of his colleagues got blisters on the face. "It happened because she had to keep the face mask on tight for a protracted time," Wang said.

China is mobilizing medical staff and other medical resources nationwide to aid Wuhan and control the epidemic. 

According to state-run media Xinhua, the first group of 135 medical workers from hospitals in Shanghai flew to Wuhan on Friday night. Shanghai also dispatched 405 medical workers in three groups to Wuhan. An additional staff of more than 400 military medics with experience of battling Sars and Ebola, state media said, who arrived in Wuhan on Friday night.

Chinese authorities on Friday said they would create a makeshift hospital designed to have an area of 25,000 square meters with 1,000 beds is expected to be completed and put into use before February 3. The makeshift hospital is dedicated to merging medical resources to provide isolation and efficient treatment for infected pneumonia patients.

 According to country-subsidized newspaper Beijing News, the sanatorium could be a prefabricated, box-kind model that may be built within a short time frame.