It never ends. Another virus? A new pnuemonia? Kazakhstan disagrees with their Chinese counterparts. ... [+] Here, a Kazakh woman receives a swab test for Covid-19 on June 16, 2020. (Photo by Kalizhan Ospanov/Xinhua via Getty) (Xinhua/ via Getty Images)

China is panicking people the world over about viruses and here is another one: an unknown pneumonia sweeping Kazakhstan that was highlighted by the Chinese Embassy as a fair warning to their biggest Silk Road partner in Central Asia.

The story broke on Thursday. And on Friday, Kazakhstan rejected Chinas warning of a new bug circulating on its home turf.

The South China Morning Post reported yesterday that the Chinese embassy was getting nervous about a spike in pneumonia cases over the last five weeks.

The death rate of this disease is much higher than the novel coronavirus. The countrys health departments are conducting comparative research into the pneumonia virus, but have yet to identify it, the embassy said in a warning to Chinese citizens in the country.

Kazakhstan public health officials said it was standard pneumonia.

It was unclear why the Chinese embassy considered it a new type of pneumonia, but saying so hearkened back to December, when medical doctors from Hubei province, in the city of Wuhan, discovered an unknown pneumonia that acted a lot like SARS. Some of them were rounded up and jailed for spreading rumors about the outbreak, later to turn into a global pandemic that has infected 11.8 million people globally and killed over 545,000, according to the World Health Organizations statistics from yesterday.

On Friday, Kazakhstans health ministry officially dismissed the Chinese governments warning of a strange pneumonia, saying the information given by the Chinese embassy was incorrect.

The health ministry did say, however, that the pneumonia cases in the country all showed clinical symptoms of abnormalities. So, something is awry with this pneumonia, whatever that may mean.

George Gao Fu, director of Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, was quoted by the China New Service today saying the Chinese authorities were still investigating it.

Aizhan Esmagambetova, chief sanitary doctor for Kazakhstan, was quoted in Informburo a state run news portal saying the death toll from pneumonia this year was 50% higher than it was last year.

And Alexei Tsoi, the Kazakhstan health minister, said that pneumonia of all types would be treated as if the patient had Covid-19, in an effort to avoid spreading it. Kazakhstan has reported more than 50,000 cases of the news SARS coronavirus. To date, of the roughly 28,000 people who have been hospitalized with pneumonia, all have tested negative for Covid-19, according to the Kazakhstan government.

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Worse Than Covid-19? China And Kazakhstan Disagree Over New Virus - Forbes