COVID-19 UPDATE: More than 70,000 cases, 1,700 deaths reported in China; 14 infected in U.S. chartered flight
중국서 코로나19로 사망 1천700명•확진 7만명 넘어
The number of deaths from the virus as well as new cases continues to climb in China.
Over in Japan, fourteen passengers, believed to be well before being evacuated from a quarantined cruise ship were found to be infected before boarding a charter plane to the United States.
Here's Choi Jeong-yoon with the updates.
The number of confirmed cases of the novel coronavirus has surpassed 70-thousand in China.
The Chinese authorities reported Monday... that the virus has infected at least two-thousand more people within the past 24 hours.
There were also one-hundred more deaths in Hubei Province, the epicenter of the outbreak,... raising the total death toll in China to more than 17-hundred.
In Japan,... another 99 people have tested positive for the virus on board the quarantined Diamond Princess cruise ship,... bringing the total number of confirmed cases on the ship to 454 and to more than 500 in Japan as a whole the highest number outside of mainland China.
On Monday morning, the U.S. evacuated its citizens from the ship where they've been holed up for more than ten days.
Some three-hundred passengers boarded two airplanes chartered by the U.S. government at Tokyo's Haneda Airport.
Among those,... shortly before they got on the plane, fourteen passengers were found to be infected.
On board, they were put in a separate area.
U.S. officials initially said they would ban infected people from the flight, but they appeared to reverse the decision early Monday.
At least one flight landed at an Air Force base in California.
Passengers will undergo another two weeks in quarantine, but there are forty-four Americans who tested positive and could not return home.
Taiwan also reported its first death from COVID-19 on Sunday in the case of a male taxi driver in his 60s.
It makes him the 5th death outside of mainland China.
He was one of two confirmed cases in Taiwan,... with the other being someone in his family.
It's been reported he had no recent travel history outside Taiwan.
However, local reports say most of his customers were people who had a history of traveling to China, Hong Kong and Macao, so it could've been human-to-human transmission from another carrier.
