China recorded fewer than 1,000 new coronavirus infections on two consecutive days earlier this week, its health authorities said Friday, after the country stopped including clinically diagnosed cases of the pneumonia-causing virus in its daily tallies.

The health authorities said they received reports of 889 new cases on Thursday, more than double Wednesday's 394, bringing the tally in mainland China to 75,465.

The death toll from the COVID-19 virus has reached 2,236, after an increase of 118 on the mainland on Thursday, 115 of them in the central province of Hubei at the center of the epidemic.

In new diagnostic and treatment guidelines published Wednesday, the health authorities said they would no longer count cases if the patient has not returned a positive result in a virus test.

The latest policy, which reversed a change to diagnostic criteria made just a week earlier, was followed by a sudden drop in daily infection cases reported Thursday.

Hubei, where the vast majority of deaths and infections have been reported, confirmed 349 new cases on Thursday after removing 279 existing cases from its tally based on test results.

Recognizing the confusion the changes have caused, Hubei's health authorities declared on Friday afternoon that no reduction in the number of confirmed cases is allowed and that all the previously reduced cases must be added back.

Those involved will be investigated and held responsible, officials told a press briefing, revealing turmoil within the provincial government whose leader was replaced just last week.

(A child is covered with a plastic bag before getting into a taxi in Beijing on Feb. 13, 2020.) 

Earlier the same day, health authorities in Hubei, revised the number of newly confirmed cases they reported earlier in the day to 631 from 411.

The new tally now includes 220 cases newly found in the province's prisons, raising the total prison infections as of Friday to 271. No change has so far been made to the total for the mainland as a whole.

The prison infections include 230 from a single women's prison in the province, according to local media.

In a related development, a prison in Shandong Province, about 360 kilometers south of Beijing, has reported 207 confirmed virus cases, including seven prison guards.

The prison discovered 200 inmates had been infected after a guard was diagnosed with the disease on Feb. 13, officials told a press briefing on Friday.

Eight provincial-level officials have been dismissed in connection with the prison infections, according to local media.

Also Friday, a prison in the eastern province of Zhejiang reported a total of 34 infections. Both the warden and the Communist Party leader of Shilifeng prison have been removed and an investigation into the outbreak has been launched, local authorities said.

Less than a week after the director of a major hospital in the worst-hit city of Wuhan in Hubei died of the infectious disease, another doctor battling the outbreak on the front line, Peng Yinhua, succumbed to the disease on Thursday night, Wuhan's health authorities said Friday.

The outbreak is believed to have originated late last year in Wuhan, Hubei's provincial capital also known as a major business and transportation hub with a population of some 11 million.

The Boao Forum for Asia, a key regional economic forum scheduled for next month, is set to join a rising number of global events postponed indefinitely due to the virus, the South China Morning Post reported Friday, citing two sources briefed on the matter.

Billed as Asia's alternative to the World Economic Forum in Davos, the conference has been held annually since 2002. Government officials and business leaders from home and abroad were to gather for four days from March 24 in the southern island province of Hainan.

The China Development Forum, a gathering of high-level government officials and global business executives organized by a foundation under the State Council, said earlier this month it would postpone the Beijing event indefinitely.

Meanwhile, Hubei announced late Thursday that it will postpone the resumption of business operations in the province to March 11 as the overall situation remains "grim and complex," despite some improvements.

Businesses in the province were set to reopen Friday. Supermarkets, pharmacies and medical supply manufacturers have been exempted from the suspensions.


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