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Wuhan is told to round up infected residents for mass quarantine camps.
A senior Chinese official has ordered the authorities in the city of Wuhan to immediately round up all residents who have been infected with the coronavirus and place them in isolation, quarantine or designated hospitals.
Sun Chunlan, a vice premier tasked with leading the central government’s response to the outbreak, said city investigators should go to each home to check the temperatures of every resident and interview infected patients’ close contacts.
“Set up a 24-hour duty system. During these wartime conditions, there must be no deserters, or they will be nailed to the pillar of historical shame forever,” Ms. Sun said.
The city’s authorities have raced to meet these instructions by setting up makeshift mass quarantine shelters this week. But concerns are growing about whether the centers, which will house thousands of people in large spaces, will be able to provide even basic care to patients and protect against the risk of further infection.
A lockdown across the city and much of its surrounding province has exacerbated a shortage of medical supplies, testing kits and hospital beds. Many residents, unwell and desperate for care, have been forced to go from hospital to hospital on foot, only to be turned away without being tested for the virus, let alone treated. They have had to resort to quarantines at home, risking the spread of the virus within families and neighborhoods.
The city has set up makeshift shelters in a sports stadium, an exhibition center and a building complex. Some went into operation on Thursday. The shelters are meant for coronavirus patients with milder symptoms, the government has said.
When Ms. Sun inspected a shelter set up in Hongshan Stadium on Tuesday, she emphasized that anyone who should be admitted must be rounded up, according to a Chinese news outlet, Modern Express. “It must be cut off from the source!” she said of the virus. “You must keep a close eye! Don’t miss it!”
Photographs taken inside the stadium showed narrow rows of simple beds separated only by desks and chairs typically used in classrooms. Some comments on Chinese social media compared the scenes to those from the Spanish flu in 1918.
According to a widely shared post on Weibo, a popular social media site, “conditions were very poor” at an exhibition center that had been converted into a quarantine facility. There were power failures and electric blankets could not be turned on, the user wrote, citing a relative who had been taken there, saying that people had to “shiver in their sleep.”
There was also a staff shortage, the post said, where “doctors and nurses were not seen to be taking note of symptoms and distributing medicine,” and oxygen devices were “seriously lacking.”
Chinese doctor who warned of outbreak has died.
A doctor who was among the first to warn about the coronavirus outbreak, only to be silenced by the police, died on Friday after himself becoming infected with the virus, the hospital treating him reported.
The Wuhan City Central Hospital said at 3:48 a.m. Friday that the doctor, Li Wenliang, had just died. “We deeply regret and mourn this,” it said on the Chinese social media site Weibo.
Just hours earlier, the hospital had said it was still fighting to save Dr. Li, 34.
The police and others questioned Dr. Li in early January after he warned a circle of medical school classmates on Dec. 30 about a viral outbreak that he said appeared similar to SARS. The police compelled him to sign a statement denouncing his warning as an unfounded and illegal rumor.
The New York Times wrote about Dr. Li on Feb. 1. “If the officials had disclosed information about the epidemic earlier,” he told The Times, “I think it would have been a lot better. There should be more openness and transparency.”
The C.D.C. will begin distributing test to diagnose coronavirus.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will distribute a new test to diagnose coronavirus infection to state and international laboratories, officials said on Thursday.
Until now, the C.D.C. has performed all of the diagnostic testing being done in the United States and assisted with diagnoses of patients abroad. Doctors had to send patient samples to an agency laboratory and wait for a response, and the process could take days.
The distribution of the new test kit is expected to greatly speed efforts to diagnose patients. It will be sent to 200 labs in the United States and about 200 labs internationally.
Each test kit can process 700 to 800 patient specimens. Results are available in about four hours.
Estee Lauder, Nintendo and Qualcomm join list of companies hit by coronavirus.
As the coronavirus spreads through China and the government tries to respond, the world is acknowledging just how much it has come to count on its No. 2 economy.
Estee Lauder, the luxury cosmetics company, warned that the outbreak would hit its financial results “in the near term,” predicting that sales in its third quarter of 2020 would be the most affected. It pegged this to the impact on air travel and tourism to key global shopping areas.
“We will be ready to return to our growth momentum as the global coronavirus outbreak is resolved,” said Fabrizio Freda, the company’s president and chief executive, in a statement.
The American luxury brand Tapestry, which owns Coach, Kate Spade and Stuart Weitzman, said the outbreak was “significantly impacting” its business, with the majority of its Chinese stores closed.
But ArcelorMittal, the world’s biggest steel maker, had a more positive outlook, saying it expected the virus to have “a short-term negative demand impact in China and to a lesser degree elsewhere,” but that demand would recover in the rest of the year.
Nintendo, the Japanese maker of video games and gaming devices, said Thursday that shipments of its Nintendo Switch game console to customers in Japan would be delayed.
Qualcomm, which is a major supplier of chips essential to running Chinese-made smartphones, is also hurting.
On Wednesday, Akash Palkhiwala, Qualcomm’s chief financial officer, told investors the company had reduced the low end of its earnings guidance for the coming three months because of the uncertainty created by the outbreak.
Also on Wednesday, Yum Brands, which operates KFC and Pizza Hut franchises in China, said that nearly one-third of its restaurants had been closed because of the outbreak.
And State-owned China National Offshore Oil Corp., China’s largest importer of liquefied natural gas, has suspended deliveries from some suppliers because of the slowdown of the economy in the wake of the coronavirus epidemic, according to S&P Global Platts, the energy analytics firm. The action and expectations that there will be more cancellations by other Chinese companies has sent global natural prices plummeting.
China National Offshore Oil, or CNOOC, is supplied with gas by multiple companies, including Royal Dutch Shell and Total of France. China is the second largest importer of liquefied natural gas after Japan.
The number of Americans quarantined on military bases continues to rise.
Two more flights evacuating Americans from Wuhan, China, the center of the coronavirus outbreak, are scheduled to land in the United States this week. Passengers will be quarantined at hotel facilities on Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio and Eppley Airfield in Omaha, Neb., government officials said.
Their arrival will bring the total number of evacuation flights to five. The first carried 195 Americans out of Wuhan last week; they are quarantined on a military base in Riverside, Calif. Two more flights landed in the United States early on Wednesday morning, and the 348 passengers, mostly American citizens, will be held at Travis Air Force Base in Fairfield, Calif., and at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar in San Diego.
All of the passengers have been ordered to remain in quarantine for 14 days from the time they left Wuhan. Two weeks is believed to be the maximum time it takes a person to become ill after being exposed to the coronavirus. Read more about what life has been like for them in quarantine.
W.H.O. will host a meeting of scientists.
To help stem the spread of the new coronavirus, the World Health Organization will convene a scientific meeting in Geneva on Feb. 11-12 to focus on speeding the development of treatments, diagnostic tests and vaccines.
At a news briefing on Thursday, W.H.O. officials said scientists still do not know exactly how the virus is transmitted and what the spectrum of severity is — in other words, how many people develop severe symptoms that can be fatal, and how many have mild cases.
“We know its DNA,” said Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the W.H.O. “We know it can be transmitted from one person to another. We know those most at risk are older people and those with underlying health conditions.”
“There is still a lot we don’t know,” he added. “We’re shadow boxing.”
W.H.O. reported about 3,700 new cases on Wednesday, a slight dip from the figure reported on Tuesday. Despite the decline, “it’s right now too early to make predictions” about the course of the epidemic, said Dr. Michael Ryan, executive director of W.H.O.’s Health Emergencies Program.
He warned that China is “still in the middle of a very intense outbreak, and we need to be careful.”
“Nearly 3,700 new cases of coronavirus in a single day is nothing to celebrate,” he added.
Death toll in China rises to 564 as lockdown enters third week.
The death toll and number of infections continued to soar in China, officials said on Thursday.
It has been two weeks since the authorities in Wuhan, the center of the coronavirus outbreak, declared that the city would be locked down as they tried to contain the virus’s spread. The cordon that was first imposed around the city of 11 million quickly expanded to encircle roughly 50 million people in the province of Hubei.
The lockdown is unprecedented in scale and experts have questioned its effectiveness. Wuhan and Hubei Province have borne the brunt of the epidemic as the sudden shutdown of transportation links into and around the area slowed the shipping of vital medical supplies. The fatality rate in Wuhan is 4.1 percent and 2.8 percent in Hubei, compared to 0.17 percent elsewhere in mainland China.
The Chinese government says the quarantine has prevented a broader outbreak, but its effects on residents of the lockdown zone have raised ethical concerns.
“This is almost a humanitarian disaster” for the central Chinese region, said Willy Lam, an adjunct professor at the Center for China Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, who cited insufficient supplies of medical equipment, food and other necessities. “The Wuhan people seem to be left high and dry by themselves.”
The World Health Organization said on Thursday that 564 people had died in China from the virus, up from nearly 500 people the day before, and that 28,060 cases had been confirmed in the country. There are also 225 cases outside the country, and one death.
Many doctors believe that deaths and infections in China are undercounted because hospitals and laboratories are under severe strain to test for the virus. Local officials in Hubei Province, the center of the outbreak, have called on health care workers to speed up the process.
Many sick residents in Hubei also say that they have been turned away by overstretched hospitals, which lack test kits and beds.
Italian hospital uses an experimental treatment.
Two Chinese citizens from Wuhan who have the coronavirus remain in critical condition at a hospital in Rome, where they are being treated with an experimental combination of antiviral drugs.
The Lazzaro Spallanzani hospital, which specializes in infectious diseases, said in a statement on Thursday that the World Health Organization had identified the drugs as “the most promising, based on the available data.”
One drug, ritonavir, is often used with other medications to treat H.I.V. and has shown “antiviral activity on coronaviruses,” according to the hospital. The other drug, remdesivir, was developed as a treatment for Ebola but has not yet been approved for use against any disease. There is some evidence that it could work against the new coronavirus, and Gilead, the company that owns the remdesivir patent, has donated doses to China.
With no proven cure in sight, the race is on to find an effective treatment for the new coronavirus. In China, scientists have reported preliminary success in treating coronavirus patients with a combination of Arbidol, an antiviral drug used for treating influenza in China and Russia, and Darunavir, an anti-H.I.V. drug. But the researchers did not say how many patients they had treated with the combination therapy, and their findings have not been reviewed by outside experts.
The Chinese authorities have also turned to other types of treatments. In a treatment plan released last week, the National Health Commission of China listed traditional Chinese remedies as well as antiviral drugs.
Day 2 of a cruise ship quarantine: permission to breathe.
Things were looking up on Thursday for the more than 2,000 passengers quarantined on a cruise ship in Yokohama, Japan: Meals were coming on a more regular schedule. The internet was upgraded to a wider bandwidth. And there was even official approval to breathe some fresh air.
Still, on the second day of a planned two-week quarantine, there was persistent concern about the spreading coronavirus and dread about long days ahead stuck inside the cabins.
As Japanese health officials continued to screen 273 passengers who were potentially exposed to the virus, they said that 20 of the 102 tested so far had been found to be positive.
The first 10 cases were announced on Wednesday, and the others on Thursday. The new cases involved four Japanese passengers, two Americans, two Canadians, one New Zealander and one Taiwanese. They were removed from the ship on Thursday and taken to medical facilities.
“I keep hearing painful coughs from a foreigner in a nearby room,” one passenger wrote on Twitter, noting with concern that crew members were delivering meals from room to room. “I might get infected today or tomorrow.”
Other passengers who have been whiling away some of the time on social media told of more hopeful signs. One noted that supplies were being moved into the port and that ambulances were in position. Another said that entertainment crews had been visiting guest rooms to cheer people up, and that toilet paper had been distributed.
Some posted a letter that had been delivered to their rooms saying that the ship was negotiating with Japanese quarantine officials to allow small groups with face masks to breathe air on open decks.
The cruise ship, the Diamond Princess, with a total of about 3,700 people on board, arrived in Yokohama on Monday after a 14-day trip to Southeast Asia. Everyone has been forced to stay on the vessel since an 80-year-old Hong Kong man who disembarked last month tested positive for the virus.
The Diamond Princess is not the only cruise ship caught up in the coronavirus epidemic. A ship called the World Dream is idling in the Kai Tak Cruise Terminal in Hong Kong after eight people from mainland China who were on a previous journey were found to be infected with the coronavirus.
Virus’s spread raises fears about Tokyo Olympics.
As the coronavirus continues to spread, the clock is ticking toward the start of the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo, raising concerns that the outbreak could disrupt the Games.
The opening ceremony is scheduled to be held in less than six months, on July 24, and Japanese officials sought on Thursday to allay fears that the dangerous virus would have any effect on the Games, athletes and fans.
“I’d like to make it clear that there have been no talks or plans being considered between organizers and the International Olympic Committee since the World Health Organization declared an emergency,” Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told Parliament.
Still, the threat remains. Only a few dozen cases have been confirmed in Japan, but the presence of a cruise ship off Yokohama with more than 2,000 quarantined passengers offered an all-too-vivid symbol of the disruptive potential of the virus.
Toshiro Muto, the chief executive of the Tokyo Olympic organizing committee, said it was important not to “unnecessarily stir up a feeling of crisis,” the Japanese public broadcaster NHK reported, but he allowed for a different scenario.
“I am extremely worried that the spread of the infectious disease could throw cold water on the momentum toward the Games,” he said. “I hope that it will be stamped out as soon as possible.”
Xi orders crackdown on people who undermine efforts to fight the virus.
China’s leader, Xi Jinping, said on Wednesday that the country was at a “critical moment” in its fight against the coronavirus epidemic and ordered a crackdown on people who undermine the country’s efforts to control the outbreak.
Mr. Xi also said his government would crack down on people who assault medical workers and who manufacture and sell fake products, according to Xinhua, the state-run news agency. He also said that officials would take aim at those who resist epidemic prevention and control efforts, including by spreading false rumors.
On Monday, Mr. Xi called the epidemic “a major test of China’s system and capacity for governance.”
The epidemic has strained China’s health care system and brought the country to a virtual standstill. And the virus continues to spread.
China warns Taiwan not to use the outbreak as an excuse for independence.
China’s government on Thursday accused Taiwan’s governing party of exploiting the coronavirus outbreak to push for Taiwan’s independence, referring to its effort to participate in World Health Organization discussions over the outbreak.
Taiwan, which is self-governed but which China claims is part of its territory, has repeatedly lobbied to be included in panels held by the W.H.O., the United Nation’s health agency. The W.H.O. cannot share information about the virus independently with Taiwan, because the United Nations considers it part of China.
“‘Taiwan independence’ separatists have seized on the opportunity to clamor for participation in the World Health Organization’s discussions, in an attempt to use the epidemic to expand the so-called ‘international space’ of Taiwan,” read a statement from China’s Taiwan Affairs Office on Thursday.
In an apparent attempt to avoid taking sides in the dispute, the W.H.O. referred to the island as “Taipei and environs” in a list of Chinese cities and provinces with confirmed cases of the coronavirus. The United Nations body has previously referred to the entire island as Taipei — Taiwan’s capital city. It has also referred to it as Taipei, China, drawing a backlash from residents.
Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs mocked the W.H.O.’s new moniker. “W.H.O., what’s wrong with you?” a pointed tweet from the ministry’s official account said.
Su Ih-jen, the former director general of the Taiwan Centers for Disease Control, said the political definitions that led to the exclusion of Taiwanese medical experts in international public health meetings had hampered prevention efforts during the SARS epidemic of 2002-3. “The two sides of the Taiwan Strait must extend olive branches at this time, put aside political considerations and work together to fight the epidemic,” he wrote that in an opinion piece for The Times.
The Taiwanese government has been taking tough measures to prevent the virus from infiltrating its borders. Health officials on Thursday banned all international cruise ships from its ports after a 60-year-old Taiwanese woman contracted the virus on a cruise ship now quarantined in Yokohoma, Japan.
Reporting was contributed by Elaine Yu, Daniel Victor, Sui-Lee Wee, Raymond Zhong, Tiffany May, Carlos Tejada, Isabella Kwai, Amy Qin, Elsie Chen, Chris Buckley, Michael Wolgelenter, Motoko Rich, Elisabetta Povoledo, Miriam Jordan, Julie Bosman, Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Katie Robertson, Cliff Krauss and Campbell Robertson.
