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The Chinese province at the epicentre of the coronavirus outbreak has reported a record rise in the death toll, as global health experts warned the epidemic could get far worse before it is brought under control.



Health officials in Hubei province said 242 people had died from the flu-like virus on Wednesday, the fastest rise in the daily count since the pathogen was identified in December, and bringing the total number of deaths in the province to 1,310.

The previous record rise in the toll was 103 on February 10.

Pictures: Coronavirus outbreak

The new tally came a day after China had reported its lowest number of new coronavirus cases in two weeks, bolstering a forecast by Beijing's senior medical adviser for the outbreak there to end by April.

But the 2,015 new confirmed cases reported in mainland China on Wednesday was dwarfed by the 14,840 new cases reported in Hubei alone on Thursday, when provincial officials said they had adopted a new methodology for counting infections.



It was not immediately clear how the new methodology affected the results, nor why the death toll rose so sharply.

Results from Chinese trials testing a combination of antiviral drugs used to treat HIV against the new coronavirus are due in weeks, but experts said a vaccine could still be months away.

© STR/AFP via Getty Images Chinese paramilitary police officers wearing protective gears transfer pails of disinfectant in Yunmeng county, outside Xiaogan City in China's central Hubei province on February 12, 2020. - The death toll from China's COVID-19 coronavirus epidemic climbed past 1,100 on February 12 but the number of new cases fell for a second straight day, as the World Health Organization urged global unity to combat the "grave threat" World Health Organisation (WHO) chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned any apparent slowdown in the spread of the epidemic should be viewed with "extreme caution".

"This outbreak could still go in any direction," he told a briefing in Geneva.

Another expert said that while the coronavirus may be peaking in China, this was not the case elsewhere.

"It has spread to other places where it's the beginning of the outbreak," Dale Fisher, head of the Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network coordinated by the WHO, said in an interview in Singapore. "In Singapore, we are at the beginning."

Singapore had a total of 50 cases, including one found at its biggest bank, DBS, on Wednesday that caused an evacuation at the head office.

Hundreds of infections have been reported in more than two dozen other countries and territories, but only two people have died from the virus outside mainland China — one in Hong Kong and another in the Philippines.

Mr Tedros said a WHO-led advance team that travelled to China this week had made good progress on the composition and scope of its work.

The head of the WHO's emergency program, Dr Mike Ryan, said it was too early "to predict the beginning, the middle or end of the epidemic".

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