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Most of the cases are in eastern China's Yangtze River delta region, with eight in Jiangsu, two in Anhui, three in Zhejiang, and eleven in Shanghai, where five of the deaths occurred.
Communist Party leader Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang sent a message to the National Health and Family Planning Commission, urging officials to "do well with assisting patients," and in disease control and prevention, the Ministry of Health posted on its website Sunday.
In Hong Kong, several suspected cases of bird flu were being tested for the virus, the South China Morning Post reported Monday.
The China representative for the World Health Organization said at a Beijing press conference Monday that there is still no evidence of "sustained human-to-human transmission." A health official added that 621 people who have been in close contact with patients are being monitored with no abnormalities observed.
WHO is preparing to send international experts to China to assist with investigating the deadly new virus, and the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention has warned consumers to avoid live poultry markets where birds are butchered.
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Hong Kong news reporters and Beijing health workers blogged cautious warnings of their own, which were quickly deleted from Weibo by content checkers.
Around 6 p.m. on April 5, a netizen said on his microblog that Hong Kong reporters at a range of newspapers were being called back from the mainland. A cell phone screen shot showing Oriental Daily's internal email notice was published alongside the message. The post was promptly deleted.
Another Weibo post suggested the virus may have spread to Beijing. A hospital postdoctoral student sent a serious online message to friends in the capital to take care. "I can't say anything, just to remind Beijing friends to be careful. Hope you can understand, my hands are trembling." A netizen shared the post, before it was deleted.
A third post, which soon disappeared, compared the new bird flu strain with the 2003 SARS epidemic, which was under-reported by the Communist Party. "Ten years ago, the biggest lesson our fellow countrymen learned from SARS is that our biggest enemy is not the virus, but covering up the truth; the best medicine is not steroids but transparency and trust. "
Translation by Frank Fang. Written in English by Carol Wickenkamp.
