The Chinese authorities will be able to win the battle against the novel coronavirus throughout the country by the end of March, Chinese Ambassador to Russia Zhang Hanhui said today.
"We can emerge victorious in the battle against that virus. In addition to Hubei, we can win that victory in other regions as early as this month, while in the epicenter of the epidemic, we could completely eliminate that virus throughout China within next month," he said at a meeting with First Deputy Speaker of the Russian State Duma Ivan Melnikov.
Deputy director of China's National Health Commission Zeng Yixin said that China is currently using five different approaches to develop the vaccine to curb the spread of the virus.
These include using inactivated coronavirus to produce a vaccine, using genetic engineering to mass-produce proteins that could act as antigens for the novel coronavirus or modifying existing vaccines for influenza, Zeng said.
"At present, some projects have entered the stage of animal testing," he added.
China's Deputy Minister of Science and Technology Xu Nanping earlier said that Chinese scientists will be able to prepare the new vaccine against the coronavirus for clinical trials at the end of April at the earliest.
According to latest reports, the death toll from the new coronavirus climbed to 2,236, while around 18,300 people recovered, with the total number of confirmed cases of 75,465.
