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Cases of infection pass 100,000, and W.H.O. calls for wider action.
The world’s leading health official implored international leaders to unleash the full power of their governments to combat the new coronavirus outbreak.
“This is not a drill,” said Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director general of the World Health Organization. “This is not a time for excuses. This is a time for pulling out all the stops.”
But around the world, as the number of cases passed 100,000, governments have displayed signs of paralysis, obfuscation and a desire to protect their own interests, even as death tolls passed 3,200 and global capitals were so threatened by infection that politicians and health officials tested positive for the illness.
In the United States, a survey of nurses found that only 29 percent had a plan to isolate potentially infected patients. Across the nation, as the number of new cases passed 200, public health labs anxiously awaited diagnostic kits, which will allow for a fuller sense of the scale of the crisis.
President Trump, at the last minute, scrapped plans to visit the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta on Friday. His staff said the decision was made because the president did not want to interfere with the work at the centers.
But in communities where local transmission is already occurring — like the area near Seattle where 10 residents of one nursing home died — the race to try and halt the virus’s further spread was already upending daily life as schools were closed and public events canceled.
Americans struggled to make sense of conflicting information from President Trump and members of his own cabinet. Vice President Mike Pence, who previously vowed that “any American could be tested,” conceded on Thursday that “we don’t have enough tests today to meet what we anticipate will be the demand going forward.”
Dr. Tedros warned that time to contain the virus was running out. “Now is the time to act,” he said. China’s draconian measures to stem the outbreak showed more signs of success on Friday, when Hubei province — the place were the coronavirus first emerged — reported that it had no new cases of infection outside its capital, Wuhan, for the first time.
Still, some political leaders around the world seemed more interested in pointing fingers at one another and complaining about tit-for-tat travel restrictions. Japanese citizens have been outraged by the hands-off approach of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe as cases have continued to climb. Lending more outrage, testing has proceeded slowly, leaving many fearful that many infections are going undetected.
In the center of the outbreak in China, residents of Wuhan who have been confined to their homes for weeks heckled the visiting vice prime minister Thursday, with some shouting from their windows: “Fake! Everything is fake!”
New York cases double, with thousands under quarantine.
A rabbi at a synagogue believed to be connected to a number of coronavirus cases in New York State has also tested positive for the virus, according to an email he sent to his congregation.
Public health officials had ordered the synagogue to halt services and many of its congregants to isolate after learning that a lawyer who lives in New Rochelle and who tested positive — the state’s second confirmed case — had attended services there last month.
As of Thursday, New York State had confirmed 22 cases of the new coronavirus, the authorities said. Eighteen of them were in Westchester County, and state officials said that all of those were connected in some way to the lawyer.
At least two New Yorkers — a health care worker who tested positive after visiting Iran, and her husband, who tested negative — are under mandatory quarantine in their Manhattan home.
Two other New York City patients, a man in his 40s and a woman in her 80s, were hospitalized after testing positive for the coronavirus, officials said on Thursday. More than 2,770 New Yorkers are currently in home isolation, according to the city’s Department of Health.
The rabbi, of the Young Israel of New Rochelle synagogue, was in self-quarantine before testing positive for the virus, he said in his email to the congregation.
“I have the virus and am doing reasonably well,” he wrote. “But I must caution all of you who have had personal contact with me to seek counsel from your health practitioner as to how to proceed.”
First death is reported in Britain as doctors lament a shortage of beds.
An older woman without any known contact with coronavirus patients became the first person in Britain to die from the new coronavirus, the British government said on Thursday. She learned she was infected after the health service expanded its testing to include seriously ill patients with respiratory problems.
That she contracted the virus without traveling or socializing with known patients added to fears that the virus was spreading undetected in Britain, where a severe shortage of intensive care beds would sap the health service’s ability to treat a deluge of cases like hers, doctors said.
In a series of interviews, doctors laid bare dire shortcomings in Britain’s efforts to combat the coronavirus: a dearth of ventilators, overflowing hospital wards, health workers having to buy their own face masks. An explosion of cases could mean denying care to the weakest patients to make room for stronger ones, they said.
“If we haven’t got ventilatory support to offer them, it’s going to end in death,” said Dr. George Priestley, an intensive care doctor and anesthesiologist. “I don’t want to be alarmist. I just want someone to pay attention.”
A decade of austerity-driven cuts to budget growth has starved the health service of workers and beds at the very moment Britain most needs them. The country has among the fewest hospital beds per person in Europe, according to studies, and many fewer intensive care beds per person than the United States, leaving its wards packed even before coronavirus patients arrive.
Global markets extend their decline.
Shares fell sharply again on Friday, with European indexes down more than 3 percent before what looked to be another tough opening on Wall Street. The declines cap a tumultuous week of highs and lows as the coronavirus outbreak continued to take a toll on investor confidence.
Yields on government bonds, which move in the opposite direction from prices, again fell to record lows, another sign that worried investors were fleeing risky assets like stocks and putting their money into low-interest but safe Treasury bonds.
Futures markets pointed to another drop when Wall Street begins trading. The S&P 500 fell more than 3 percent on Thursday.
Russia, with few confirmed cases, announces aggressive action to reassure a jittery public.
Russia, if official figures are to be believed, has waged one of the world’s most successful campaigns to halt the spread of the coronavirus, reporting just 10 cases across a vast country with 11 time zones and a border with China more than 2,600 miles long.
So it came as a surprise this week when the city authorities in Moscow suddenly announced a raft of sweeping precautionary measures.
In a decree published late Wednesday, the capital’s mayor, Sergei S. Sobyanin, ordered all residents who visit China, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, South Korea, or other unspecified “states with an unfavorable coronavirus situation” to report to the municipal government upon their return to the capital and to “self-isolate” for two weeks. The United States has now been added to the list, too.
Mr. Sobyanin’s decree, which declared a “regime of heightened readiness” for the capital, created uncertainty and dismay rather than reassurance, raising questions about why a city with just one officially reported case had suddenly instituted such stringent controls.
Russia last month sealed its border with China and then barred all Chinese citizens from visiting, hammering a tourism industry heavily reliant on travelers from China. The flag carrier, Aeroflot, on Wednesday said it was canceling all flights to and from Hong Kong starting this weekend.
The jitters have grown so severe, despite the tiny number of officially confirmed cases, that a newsreader on state television suggested late Wednesday that it might be necessary to introduce martial law if the virus were to spread unchecked in Russia.
The moves in Moscow follow an alarm this week in St Petersburg, Russia’s second-biggest city, after an Italian exchange student who returned to Russia on Feb. 29 tested positive for the virus. Fellow students in the Italian’s dormitory at the North-Western State Medical University said that they had been ordered not to leave the building.
Officials denied that the dormitory, which houses around 700 students, had been placed under quarantine, saying that its residents were simply under “medical supervision.”
Another casualty of Russia’s pre-emptive actions has been the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, an annual event that is usually presided over by President Vladimir V. Putin. This year’s forum in June has been canceled.
Here’s what to do if you think you’re sick.
French president urges citizens to avoid visiting retirement homes.
Following news that a French lawmaker had been placed in intensive care after testing positive for the coronavirus, President Emmanuel Macron of France urged citizens to avoid visiting retirement homes and the elderly “as much as possible.”
“Our absolute priority is to protect people who are most vulnerable to the virus,” Mr. Macron said on Friday said after visiting a retirement home in Paris, noting that seniors and people who have other illness were most at risk.
Mr. Macron said that his government was ready to “confront this epidemic over time.”
“The measures that we take have to be rigorous and reasonable, and we have to be able to stay the distance together,” Mr. Macron said, as the number of infected patients in France increased to 577, with nine deaths.
Speaking to staff members at the retirement home, Mr. Macron said that shutting down entire sections of the French economy or society was not feasible over a long period of time and that such actions would have unintended ripple effects. As an example, he said that closing all schools would prevent many health care workers from going to work.
“You have to be able to last,” Mr. Macron said. “If you take measures that are very restrictive, at some point, it isn’t tenable over time. If it isn’t tenable over time, you have to backtrack, and if you have to backtrack without any scientific justification, that’s when you create a panic.”
The lawmaker who fell ill, Jean-Luc Reitzer, represents Haut-Rhin, an area that has become a source of growing concern for the authorities. Laurent Touvet, the top official in Haut-Rhin, said at a news conference on Friday that the district had 81 confirmed cases — an eightfold increase in just 48 hours.
The health authorities have traced many of those cases to an evangelical religious gathering that was held in the city of Mulhouse in February, and there are concerns that attendees might have spread the virus to other regions.
Passengers and crew onboard the cruise ship off California await test results.
The 11 passengers and 10 crew members on the cruise ship idling off San Francisco who were showing symptoms of the coronavirus could learn the results of their diagnostic tests on Friday.
The panic on the ship, the Grand Princess, began after a 71-year-old man who had traveled on a previous leg of the cruise, a round trip from San Francisco to Mexico, died after leaving the ship. It was the first death from the coronavirus in California. Another passenger from that leg of the trip also tested positive for the virus.
The more than 2,000 onboard have been confined to their cabins, passengers said. Crew members have canceled large gatherings and were cleaning surfaces more often, among other precautionary measures.
As the coronavirus, which broke out in China last year, has spread across the globe, the West Coast has taken the brunt of the caseload in the United States.
In Washington State, 13 people have died from the virus, most from a Seattle-area nursing home. Also in the Seattle area, two Microsoft employees were being treated for the coronavirus, the first from the company to get the diagnosis, a company spokesman said overnight Thursday. And in California, 56 people have been treated for the coronavirus, the most of any state.
In Southern California, three students at the University of California, Los Angeles are being tested for the virus by the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health, the school’s chancellor said on Thursday night. The students were self-isolating off campus. While the public health department has expedited the test results, university officials decided to keep the campus on its normal schedule of classes and activities.
In Bethlehem, concerns about the virus limit visits.
Tourism to the West Bank has been banned indefinitely and the city of Bethlehem is on lockdown after seven Palestinian hotel workers there tested positive for the coronavirus, officials said.
The Church of the Nativity, revered as the birthplace of Jesus, and other houses of worship in Bethlehem were closed for two weeks.
The Palestinian Authority declared a state of emergency Friday morning, shutting schools and colleges, suspending sporting events, restricting gatherings and travel between cities on the West Bank and canceling the hotel reservations of foreign tourists.
Outside Bethlehem, tour buses idled near the gates to the city on Friday after the Israeli military closed off a main checkpoint, barring Israelis and Palestinians from entering or leaving the city.
The seven sick Palestinians worked at a hotel in Bethlehem where a group of Greek tourists stayed in late February. Some 21 members of the group tested positive for the virus on their return home. The group’s bus driver, an East Jerusalem resident, is also infected.
The Palestinian health minister, Mai al-Kaila, came under harsh criticism after announcing the spread of the virus to Bethlehem on Thursday. In Jericho, protesters set tires ablaze late Thursday over false rumors that patients with the virus were being transferred there.
‘Everything is fake!’ Residents of a locked-down Chinese city vent their rage at politicians.
Residents in Wuhan, the Chinese city at the center of the global outbreak, shouted complaints on Thursday from their balconies at visiting government officials, the latest sign of simmering anger in the locked-down city.
The rare rebuke of high-level officials was captured on video and circulated on social and state-run media. The visiting delegation included Sun Chunlan, a vice premier who is leading the central government’s response to the outbreak.
“Everything is fake!” shouted one resident, in a video clip that was shared on social media by People’s Daily, a state-run newspaper, which covered the government’s response to the heckling.
The videos taken on Thursday did not make clear the exact reason for residents’ dissatisfaction. People’s Daily said the accusations were aimed at local neighborhood officials who had “faked” deliveries of vegetables and meat to residents. Critics were skeptical of that explanation, seeing the response as an attempt by high-level officials to deflect blame for mishandling the crisis.
Wuhan and many other cities in Hubei Province have been under strict lockdown since January. As the outbreak has escalated, residents have voiced frustration with provincial and central government officials. Unable to leave their homes, many residents have had to rely on their neighborhood committees to organize deliveries of groceries and other basic essentials — a process that has been unevenly implemented, much to the frustration of local residents.
CCTV, the state-run broadcaster, said Thursday evening that Ms. Sun had ordered local provincial and city officials to conduct an “in-depth investigation” in response to the “difficulties and problems reported by the masses at the scene.”
Reporting was contributed by Michael Gold, Alan Yuhas, Adeel Hassan, Aurelien Breeden, David Halbfinger, Mohammed Najib, Marc Santora, Benjamin Mueller, Russell Goldman, Amy Qin, Elaine Yu, Javier C. Hernández, Max Fisher, Ben Dooley, Mike Isaac, David Yaffe-Bellany and Karen Weise.
