Geneva:
The number of cases of the deadly novel coronavirus being reported on a daily basis in China is "stabilising", the World Health Organisation said on Saturday.
The UN health agency said this was "good news" but cautioned that it was too early to make any predictions about whether the virus might have peaked.
The coronavirus has already infected more than 34,500 people and killed more than 700.
"There has been a stabilisation in the number of cases reported from Hubei," Michael Ryan, head of WHO's Health Emergencies Programme, said at a briefing in Geneva.
The new deaths on Saturday reached another daily record at 89, data from the National Health Commission showed, pushing the total well over the 774 who died from SARS, or Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome.
The central Chinese province of Hubei has been at the epicentre of the virus outbreak and has been placed under lockdown by the authorities in an effort to contain the virus.
"We're in a four-day stable period where the number of reported cases hasn't advanced. That's good news and may reflect the impact of the control measures that have been put in place," Ryan said.
But he added that it was "very early to make any predictions".
WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the trend was "not really accelerating" but also called for "caution".
Tedros warned against misinformation about the virus, saying it made the work of healthcare staff harder.
"We're not just battling the virus, we're also battling the trolls and conspiracy theorists that push misinformation and undermine the outbreak response," he said.
China raised the death toll from the coronavirus epidemic to 811, passing the number killed globally by the SARS epidemic in 2002/2003 and raising anxiety among people preparing to return to work after an extended Lunar New Year break.
Struggling to contain the spread of the disease, authorities had told businesses to tack up to 10 extra days onto holidays that had been due to finish at the end of January as the rising numbers of dead and infected cast a pall over the country.
The virus has now spread to 25 countries, although the majority of illnesses and deaths are in Hubei Province, which is where Wuhan is located. There are 12 confirmed cases in the U.S.
Coronavirus has a fatality rate of 2.1% so far, according to MarketWatch calculations based on official figures. That rate has remained steady for the past several weeks.
A study published in the medical journal JAMA on Friday suggests a higher fatality rate, and suggests some patients may be more contagious than others. One patient spread the virus to at least 10 health-care workers and four patients at the hospital.
Assuming an incubation period of up to 14 days, with an average of seven days before a person presents with symptoms of the virus, the current fatality rate may end up being higher than the eventual rate.
Meanwhile,Chinese gaming giant Tencent Holdings Ltd has asked its employees to continue working from home until Feb.21, extending the period from Feb.14 announced previously, to protect employees from the spread of the coronavirus, the company said on its official WeChat account on Sunday.
China has blocked a plan by Apple Inc supplier Foxconn Technology Co Ltd to resume production in China from Monday, the Nikkei business daily reported on Saturday, amid concerns about the spread of the new coronavirus.
Naming the new virus.
Keen to avoid stigmatising the city of Wuhan, where the outbreak began, or Chinese people, the World Health Organization is treading carefully on naming the new virus.
The UN health agency's official temporary name for the disease, which it has designated as a global health emergency, is "2019-nCoV acute respiratory disease".
The date refers to when it was first identified on December 31, 2019 and "nCoV" stands for "novel coronavirus" — the family of viruses it belongs to.
"We thought it was very important that we provide an interim name so that no location was associated with the name," Maria Van Kerkhove, head of the WHO's Emerging Diseases unit, told the agency's executive board on Friday.
"I'm sure you've all seen many media reports that are still calling it using Wuhan or China and we wanted to ensure that there was no stigma," she said.
The final decision on a name is expected within days and is up to the WHO itself as well as coronavirus experts on the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV).
Meanwhile, China announced Saturday that it would temporarily call the disease, which has killed more than 700 people, Novel Coronavirus Pneumonia (NCP).
Picking a more specific name is fraught with dangers.
Under a set of guidelines issued in 2015, WHO advises against using place names such as Ebola and Zika — where those diseases were first identified and which are now inevitably linked to them in the public imagination.
Sylvie Briand, head of WHO's Global Infectious Hazard Preparedness division, said this week that the use of a place name created "an unnecessary burden".
Asked about a planned WHO-led international mission to China, he also said a list of names had been submitted to Chinese authorities and the team leader would be travelling there on Monday or Tuesday.
"The rest of the experts will also follow after that," he said.
Asked if the mission would include members of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), he said: "I hope so".
China has been critical of measures taken by the United States in response to the virus and has so far rejected an offer of assistance from the CDC.