By Mike Wehner @MikeWehner
August 26th, 2020 at 11:04 AM
·
Chinese officials claim that the neighboring country of
Kazakhstan is dealing with an outbreak of a new virus that’s even deadlier than the
novel coronavirus.
·
Kazakhstan officials say there is no new virus, though the country
is dealing with a spike in COVID-19 cases.
·
China’s handling of COVID-19 news has been sketchy since the
early days of the pandemic, and it’s unclear why the country is making the
claims.
With the ongoing coronavirus
pandemic still raging across the globe, the last thing we need is another new
virus that is even more deadly. Unfortunately, that’s what recently popped up in Kazakhstan, at
least according to Chinese health officials. The initial reports sounded pretty
dire, with the new “unknown pneumonia” carrying a higher fatality rate than
COVID-19, and cases piling up rapidly.
It was very, very bad news. That is
until Kazakhstan officials decided to chime in on the reports and
essentially denied the entire thing.
China hasn’t backed down on its initial claims and insists that its neighbor is
dealing with something very serious.
Kazakhstan went into lockdown in
mid-March over the coronavirus pandemic. It enacted many of the same
restrictions we’ve seen worldwide, and cases of COVID-19 began to trend downward.
The country made the decision to “reopen,” or lift many of the lockdown
restrictions in early May. Recently, the infection rate has begun to trend
upward once again.
The country recently had its most
reported infections in a single day. Roughly two weeks ago, officials reported
nearly 2,000 new COVID-19 cases in a single day, which is a record for the
country. The government has called this the “second wave,” and it’s similar to
what many other countries, including the United States, are currently battling,
but whether there is a new virus running rampant in the country is still
unclear.
Kazakhstan officials have noted a
huge spike in pneumonia in the country, and as we all know, COVID-19 emerged as
an unidentified pneumonia in China before it was isolated and named. However,
there’s no real evidence that the illness is anything other than a combination
of seasonal illness and undiagnosed COVID-19 infections, so it’s odd that China
would immediately jump to declaring that a new virus was on the loose.
Or, maybe it’s not so odd.
China’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic has been interesting, to say the
least. The country has kept a lot of information about the pandemic and its
process of fighting it from the public. Reports out of China suggest that the situation
in some areas was much, much worse than Chinese officials were claiming, so
perhaps it’s not a stretch to think that China was eager to draw attention away
from itself by claiming that a new virus in a different country was even more
of a problem.
Whatever the case, it’s now been
over a month since China made its initial claims, and Kazakhstan has yet to
report the emergence of anything other than an increase in COVID-19 cases. If
there really was a new virus in the country that was even worse than the novel
coronavirus, it’s sure taking its time.
Mike Wehner has reported on technology and video games for the
past decade, covering breaking news and trends in VR, wearables, smartphones,
and future tech. Most recently, Mike served as Tech Editor at The Daily Dot,
and has been featured in USA Today, Time.com, and countless other web and print
outlets. His love of reporting is second only to his gaming addiction.
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