In China, the coronavirus outbreak led to the postponement of its annual parliamentary meeting, which is held in Beijing every March.
The National People’s Congress (NPC) gathers hundreds of delegates in the country. Due to the coronavirus outbreak, the standing committee for the NPC postponed a critical political event.
The committee reported via the state broadcaster CCTV that the new date of the NPC will be announced separately.
No official data has been released yet about the state of the Chinese economy in relation to the pandemic. Meanwhile, experts who monitor the impact of the coronavirus outbreak on the economy reveal the slowdown of the world’s second-biggest economy.
“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.
China’s national health commission reported 409 new coronavirus cases on February 23, a decline from 648 a day earlier. This adds to the 77,150 confirmed cases of Covid-19 in China. The alert levels in the provinces of Yunnan, Guizhou, Guangdong and Shanxi have been lowered, following Gansu and Liaoning over the weekend.
A “steep decline” in the number of infections has been observed, according to Bruce Aylward, the head of a team of WHO experts visiting China. During a joint briefing in Beijing by the World Health Organization and China’s national health commission, Alyward emphasized that “multiple sources of data” manifest the declines. “This is falling and it is falling because of the actions that are being taken," he said.
Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, described Covid-19 as “both a crisis and a big test” for China. He said that the virus is a grave public health emergency and one of the country’s challenges since the people’s republic has been founded.
“The outbreak of novel coronavirus pneumonia will inevitably have a relatively big impact on the economy and society,” Xi said, explaining that the effect would not less and is manageable.
