Coronavirus: China postpones National People's Congress

China has delayed its annual parliamentary meeting as authorities struggle to contain the coronavirus outbreak, which has spread to more countries and prompted fears of a global pandemic.

For the first time in decades, Beijing on Monday postponed the key political event, the National People’s Congress (NPC), where hundreds of delegates gather in Beijing every March.

The standing committee for the NPC said a new date for the meeting would be announced separately, according to the state broadcaster CCTV.

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China’s national health commission reported its highest number of deaths in 11 days, with a further 150 victims. All but one of the fatalities and 11 of the new infections were in Hubei province, the centre of the outbreak.

The commission reported 409 new coronavirus cases, down from 648 a day earlier and, bringing the total number of confirmed cases of Covid-19 in China to 77,150. The provinces of Yunnan, Guizhou, Guangdong and Shanxi lowered their alert levels , following Gansu and Liaoning over the weekend.

At a joint briefing in Beijing by the World Health Organization and China’s national health commission, Bruce Aylward, the head of a team of WHO experts visiting China, said there had been a “steep decline” in the number of infections, despite statistical issues. Last week, China twice changed how it counts confirmed cases of infection, causing confusion.

“I know people look at the numbers and say what’s really happening,” he said, adding that “multiple sources of data” point to declines. “This is falling and it is falling because of the actions that are being taken.”

Elsewhere, Iran’s semi-official news agency reported that 50 people had died from the virus in the city of Qom this month, although a minister denied it. Iraq, Kuwait, Bahrain and Afghanistan reported their first cases as infections outside of China jumped. South Korea reported 70 more cases of the virus, bringing its total to 833.

In Italy, authorities have implemented draconian measures to try to halt an outbreak in the north of the country, including imposing fines on anyone caught entering or leaving outbreak areas, as a fourth person was confirmed to have died there. Starting on Tuesday, Hong Kong will begin barring travellers from South Korea if they are not Hong Kong residents.

The increase in the number of cases outside China comes a day after the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, gave a major speech on the crisis, seeking to assure the public that the virus would soon be contained. The reversal of a previous announcement that a lockdown would be loosened in Wuhan, the city at the centre of the outbreak, has cast further doubt on the government’s handling of the crisis.

Authorities in Wuhan had said residents not under quarantine or observation could begin to leave the city, which has been subjected to strict traffic restrictions since 23 January. But later on Monday afternoon, a new statement declared the previous notice “invalid” and said all relevant personnel had been “severely criticised and dealt with”.

The later notice called on Wuhan to “firmly implement” Xi’s “important instructions” on preventing the export of the virus to other parts of the country.

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Beijing has begun to hit back against travel restrictions imposed on Chinese nationals. China’s ministry of culture and tourism advised its citizens against travelling to the US, citing the country’s “overreaction” to the virus, which had caused Chinese nationals to be “treated unfairly”.

Wuhan’s government said it would continue to impose strict controls over its borders in order to prevent the virus from spreading further.

On Sunday, Xi said Covid-19 was “both a crisis and a big test” for the country, describing the virus as a major public health emergency and one of the country’s biggest challenges since the founding of the people’s republic.

“The outbreak of novel coronavirus pneumonia will inevitably have a relatively big impact on the economy and society,” Xi said, but added that the impact would be temporary and generally manageable.

Some observers greeted Monday’s figures with scepticism, believing they are part of efforts to project a sense of control over the crisis. Chinese officials have twice changed the criteria for confirmed infections, making the data harder to parse.

China has allocated 99.5bn yuan (£11bn) to curb the outbreak, China’s assistant finance minister, Ou Wenhan, said in a Beijing press briefing on Monday.

Officials from WHO visited Wuhan at the weekend for the first time since the outbreak, inspecting two hospitals and meeting officials at the centre for disease control in the province.

There is growing alarm among economists and investors that the impact on global growth is going to be much worse than previously estimated.

There is no official data about how the Chinese economy has fared in the past three weeks, but trackers of coal consumption and traffic congestion show that the world’s second-biggest economy is still paralysed despite claims that many manufacturing areas are back to work.

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“The presumption was that we would see intermediate supply chains quickly reconnected and I think the market has had to go through a period of questioning that logic,” said Ray Attrill, the head of FX strategy at National Australia Bank.

The spike in the number of cases in South Korea on Monday, which brought the national total to 763, prompted shares to fall in Australia and Hong Kong.

One of the nation’s largest cities, Daegu, has been placed under semi-lockdown, its national assembly session has been cancelled, and the start of school postponed. Other nations have also begun to suspend flights into the country. South Korea’s K-league postponed the start of the new football season in the face of the growing outbreak.