Coronavirus Live Updates: Outbreak in Northern Italy Poses National Challenge

An ominous quiet descends on Milan, Italy’s business engine.

Milan’s normally bustling streets, stores and restaurants are eerily empty. In Italy’s commercial hub, major companies, from banks to the fashion house Giorgio Armani, are telling employees to work at home.

The doors are closed to visitors at the famed opera house La Scala, the Duomo Cathedral — even the bars.

“Everything seems to have completely stopped,” said Leonardo Miri, 48, an IBM employee. He had been turned away from the company’s offices. No one was there.

Europe’s largest outbreak of the new coronavirus outbreak has erupted in Lombardy, the northern region that includes Milan. About half of the country’s 229 cases are in Lombardy. The government said at least 26 patients were in intensive care, and has reported six deaths.

The virus represents perhaps the greatest challenge to Europe since the 2015 migration crisis. It could test the principle of open borders and the vaunted but strained European public health systems.

For Italy, Europe’s slowest-growing economy, the vulnerabilities are clear.

Milan represents 10 percent of the Italian economy; Lombardy, more than 20 percent. Milan’s stock market plunged by more than 5 percent on Monday over fears of what may be in store.

Flights from China are blocked and the closure of Chinese factories has disrupted Italian supply chains. Marco Barbieri, the leader of Confcommercio Milan, a business alliance, estimated profits to be off by 20 percent for companies dependent on China.

Italy has approved nationwide emergency measures. Eleven towns in Lombardy are on lockdown, and Italy’s government has promised them help similar to that given after earthquakes, like the suspension of tax payments.

Italy’s neighbors have not closed their borders, but the country fears being ostracized and carved into islands of quarantine. The southern region of Basilicata has announced a quarantine on northerners.

An Italian who was hospitalized after testing positive on the Spanish island of Tenerife — Spain’s third case — is apparently from Lombardy.

The island nation of Mauritius, in the Indian Ocean, gave passengers on an Alitalia flight from Rome a choice of quarantine or immediate return. They flew back to Italy.

A planned three-week shoot in Italy for Tom Cruise’s new “Mission: Impossible” film has been postponed because of the outbreak, Paramount Pictures announced on Monday. Filming had been scheduled to start on Monday in Venice.

Deaths in Iran rise to at least 12. Linked cases elsewhere point to Mideast spread.

Public health experts warn that Iran, whose borders are crossed each year by millions of religious pilgrims, migrant workers and others, is one of the biggest causes for worry in what threatens to become a global epidemic.

Iran said on Monday that it had 12 coronavirus deaths — more than any country but China — but has acknowledged only 61 cases. By contrast, South Korea has reported fewer deaths, just seven, but more than 800 infections. Many Iranians suspect the government is hiding the true extent of the outbreak.

Cases in Iraq, Afghanistan, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Lebanon and Canada have been traced to Iran.

Ahmad Amiri Farahani, a lawmaker representing Qom, a popular pilgrimage destination where hundreds of Chinese students are currently studying, claimed on Monday that the virus had killed at least 50 there.

“Every day 10 people are dying in Qom,” he said in Parliament, demanding a quarantine on his city.

Health ministry officials vehemently disputed his claims. “I will resign if the numbers are even half or a quarter of this,” said Ahmad Harirchi, an adviser to the health minister.

The head of a medical school in Qom said the ministry had ordered the city not to release its own figures.

Qom is visited annually by hundreds of thousands of Shiite Muslims, who can take infections home with them. Many come from countries like Syria, Afghanistan and Yemen that have been devastated by war, with little capacity to fight an epidemic.

Pakistan’s 596-mile frontier with Iran, with few border controls, poses particular challenges in controlling the spread of the virus.

The outbreak in Iran feeds the skepticism of Iranians who are already inclined to disbelieve government pronouncements. Many have ignored official urging not to visit hospitals unless they are seriously ill, crowding emergency rooms for testing.

Tehran has announced a weeklong closure of schools, universities and cultural centers across 14 provinces in an effort to curb the outbreak. Long lines have formed outside pharmacies, and there is a shortage of masks and disinfectants.

China is getting the epidemic under control, but most of the world is unready, W.H.O. says.

China appears to be getting the new coronavirus under control, but with infections spreading rapidly in South Korea, Iran and Italy, the world is not prepared for a major outbreak, World Health Organization officials said on Monday.

A W.H.O. mission to China has found that the daily tally of new cases there peaked and then plateaued between Jan. 23 and Feb. 2, and has steadily declined since.

“We’re encouraged by the continued decline in cases in China,” said Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the organization’s director general.

The W.H.O. team credited lockdown measures China imposed in late January for averting a faster spread from Wuhan, the city at the center of the epidemic. China sealed off cities, shut down businesses and schools, and ordered people to avoid mass gatherings.

“China has taken one of the most ancient strategies for infectious disease control and rolled out probably the most ambitious and I would say agile and aggressive disease-contagion efforts in history,” said Bruce Aylward, a Canadian doctor and epidemiologist who led the W.H.O. mission to China.

But experts question whether the epidemic is truly waning in China, which changed the way it counted cases earlier this month, then changed back again. Some infected people have been unable or reluctant to receive medical care, and there is a shortage of viral testing kits, which may mean that cases go undetected.

The infection has been fatal in 2 to 4 percent of cases within Wuhan, but in less than 1 percent elsewhere, the W.H.O. said.

The organization has declared the epidemic a public health emergency, but Dr. Tedros said it has not reached the level of a pandemic — yet.

“For the moment, we are not witnessing the uncontained global spread of this virus and we are not witnessing large-scale severe disease or deaths,” he said. “Does this virus have pandemic potential? Absolutely it has.”

Trump expected to ask for emergency funding.

Bowing to pressure from Congress, the Trump administration is expected to request emergency funding to respond to the coronavirus.

Congress has been asking for weeks to seek more spending on the epidemic, and the administration alerted lawmakers that it could make the request Monday afternoon, but said nothing about the amount.

The number of infected people in the United States has reached 53, up from 34 on Friday, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. All involved people who had traveled to Asia or, in two cases, their immediate contacts.

President Trump has proposed cuts to public health and infectious disease programs, and in 2018, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention narrowed its epidemic work from 49 countries to 10.

All the new U.S. cases reported Monday occurred among people who were flown back from Asia by the State Department, the C.D.C. reported. Nearly all involve former passengers on the Diamond Princess cruise ship docked in Japan. They are in quarantine on military bases in California and Texas.

Twelve of the total American cases occurred in people who had traveled to China, returned on their own and became ill after arriving back in the United States. The two contact cases are from that group.

Ten of those 14 people are either isolating at home (under supervision from health officials) or being treated at hospitals. The remaining four have recovered, been through quarantine periods and are back out in the world.

Britain has also had the experience of having returned Diamond Princess passengers test positive. On Monday, it announced that four who had been in quarantine since returning to the country were infected, raising that country’s number of cases to 13. The four were transferred to infection centers in Sheffield, Liverpool and Newcastle, the National Health Service said.

Global stocks plummet over coronavirus concerns.

Stocks tumbled around the world on Monday as expanding outbreaks of the coronavirus in Italy and in South Korea forced investors to reconsider the threat the virus poses to economies in Europe and the United States.

The fall suggests that pessimism about the virus’s impact is deeper than official forecasts represent.

China’s economy has already been hamstrung by measures to contain the virus, which has infected more than 77,000 people there and triggered quarantines that have closed factories. But rapidly spreading outbreaks elsewhere in Asia as well as Europe and the Middle East have begun to erode confidence that the virus will pass sooner rather than later.

The S&P 500 fell more than 3.3 percent, its biggest daily decline since February 2018, while the Dow Jones industrial average fell more than 1,000 points. European markets recorded their worst day since 2016, and major benchmarks in Asia also closed sharply lower.

In bond markets, yields tumbled, reflecting a sharp, if perhaps temporary, downgrade of expectations for economic growth and inflation.

Gold — viewed as a safe place to invest during market tumult — rose to a seven-year high, and is up more than 10 percent since the start of 2020.

Investors have been jumpy since the start of the crisis in January, because China’s factories are vital links in global supply chains, taking in shipments of raw materials and sending out everything from clothing to iPhones to auto parts. China is also a huge consumer market, but demand there has plummeted as people shelter in their homes.

South Korea’s escalating outbreak is also a focus of concern. Samsung, a pillar of the country’s economy, closed a factory briefly after one of its workers was found to have the virus.

China’s idled factories and the restrictions on travel in Asia and beyond are dampening demand for crude oil, whose prices took their sharpest drop since early January. That will add to pressure on OPEC and Russia to take measures to reduce oil supplies at their next meeting, which is scheduled for early March in Vienna.

United Airlines on Monday withdrew its full-year 2020 guidance, citing heightened uncertainty over how the duration and spread of the coronavirus to other regions could impact overall air travel demand.

Chinese officials try to get migrants back to work.

China’s government and businesses are sending out chartered trains, buses and airplanes to bring migrant workers back to their jobs, according to state media, as the government tries to get the world’s second-largest economy humming again.

China Eastern Airlines last week began offering chartered flights to transport people back to workplaces in parts of the country they had been unable to reach after travel restrictions were imposed. In one day, it received requests from nearly 60 companies.

It sent its first chartered plane on Monday to bring 160 workers from Henan Province in central China to the industrial and commercial center of Shanghai.

Also last week, the state rail service began offering special trains that so far have taken more than 30,000 workers back to work in Guangdong, Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces, as well as cities like Shanghai. Some companies have dispatched buses to take employees back to factories.

Workers will have to take a health check before they can make the trip. They will use special tunnels to check in. The trains and buses are nonstop directly to the destinations.

Much of China’s work force of more than 700 million people had gone home to celebrate the Lunar New Year when the coronavirus outbreak began, and then were unable to return to the cities where they worked.

Cong Liang, an official with the National Development and Reform Commission, said on Monday at a news conference that a large percentage of major manufacturing businesses are resuming production. In Zhejiang province, 90 percent of industrial enterprises with annual revenue of $2.8 million or more have resumed operation. Many of those businesses are likely at less than full production, however.

In South Korea, cases skyrocket to more than 800.

South Korea on Monday reported 231 more cases of the virus that causes the disease Covid-19, bringing the nation’s total to 833 cases and seven deaths.

President Moon Jae-in put South Korea on the highest possible alert on Sunday, a move that empowers the government to lock down cities and take other sweeping measures to contain the outbreak.

“The coming few days will be a critical time for us,” Mr. Moon said at an emergency meeting of government officials to discuss the outbreak. “The central government, local governments, health officials and medical personnel and the entire people must wage an all-out, concerted response to the problem.”

Many of South Korea’s coronavirus cases are in the southeastern city of Daegu, which has essentially been placed under a state of emergency, though people are still free to enter and leave the city.

More than half of the people confirmed to have been infected are either members of the Shincheonji Church of Jesus, a secretive religious sect with a strong presence in Daegu, or their relatives or other contacts.

On Monday, the United States Forces Korea confirmed that a dependent of a member of the armed forces living in Daegu was among those who had tested positive for the virus.

The U.S. and South Korean military are considering scaling back command post training because of heightened concerns about the coronavirus, the defense ministers of both countries said on Monday.

China postpones annual political assembly and temporarily bans eating wildlife.

China’s top legislative body postponed the annual full meeting of the National People’s Congress and ordered a temporary ban on the consumption of all wildlife until officials draft new laws regulating the trade, which has been identified as a probable source of the new coronavirus.

The Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, China’s parliamentary body, had earlier signaled the delay in the annual National People’s conference meeting, reflecting how the epidemic has upended the Communist Party’s carefully choreographed and regimented political events.

The committee did not announce a new date for the session, which is held with pomp and pageantry in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing.

The decision on the consumption of wildlife reflected a groundswell of public sentiment against the custom, practiced in some parts of the country, of eating various types of wildlife, including bats, civets and hedgehogs.

Although the exact course of the coronavirus’ path is still under investigation, health officials and scientists say it spread outward from a wholesale market in Wuhan where vendors sold live wild animals in crowded stalls in close quarters with meat, vegetables and other products.

Chinese law currently allows people to raise or hunt 54 different animals, birds, reptiles and insects. In a statement, the committee indicated that it would look to strengthen the existing laws, as well as the punishments for violations, but that it would take some time to do so. The trafficking of endangered or threatened wildlife, such as pangolins, is already prohibited.

“Since the outbreak of the novel coronavirus epidemic, the outstanding problems of excessive consumption of wild animals and its huge hidden dangers to public health safety have attracted wide attention from all walks of life,” the committee’s statement said, “but a comprehensive revision of the wildlife protection law requires a process.”

Hong Kong will begin evacuating residents from Wuhan.

The Hong Kong government said on Monday that it would start evacuating its residents who have been stranded in the center of the coronavirus outbreak, bending to mounting pressure after one Hong Kong resident died there.

Thousands of Hong Kong residents have been unable to return home after much of Hubei Province was put on lockdown last month. When officials said on Sunday that an infected 77-year-old Hong Kong man had died in Wuhan, Hubei’s capital, some lawmakers demanded to know why any Hong Kong residents remained stuck in mainland China.

More than a dozen countries have evacuated their citizens from Wuhan. But Beijing complained that U.S. moves to get American citizens and diplomats out of the city had created a panic. The mainland government showed little interest in letting people from Hong Kong join the exodus.

Hong Kong is part of China but operates under a model of “one country, two systems,” with its own local government, courts and border controls. Despite the city’s autonomy, its inability to evacuate residents earlier was a sharp reminder of Beijing’s ultimate authority.

Afghanistan confirms first case along porous border with Iran.

Afghanistan declared a state of emergency in the western province of Herat on Monday after health officials confirmed the country’s first case of coronavirus in the region, which shares a porous border with Iran.

“The case was identified right away and measures taken — the patient’s health is under control and there isn’t concern about the individual’s health at this point,” Health Minister Ferozuddin Feroz said.

Mr. Feroz said it was estimated that more than 1,000 Afghans from Herat had traveled over the past few weeks, to Qom, Iran, a place of pilgrimage for Shiite Muslims because of its many shrines. He said officials were identifying those people for more screening and tests. Five were staying in an 80-bed quarantine center that had been established in Herat, he added.

The patient confirmed to have the virus was among five Afghan citizens who had been in Qom, the city where the first cases and fatalities were reported in Iran. They transited through Dubai before returning to Herat, Mr. Feroz said.

Afghanistan’s National Security Council said on Sunday that the country had suspended air and ground transport to Iran and asked for consular services to be limited to “essential humanitarian needs.” Usually, huge numbers of Afghan migrant workers travel back and forth across the border.

Beyond that, the border between the two countries is punctured by extensive smuggling routes, leaving concern even after official measures to limit formal movement.

Reporting and research were contributed by Knvul Sheikh, Matt Phillips, Choe Sang-Hun, Raymond Zhong, Russell Goldman, Monica Davey, Elisabetta Povoledo, Salman Masood, Emma Bubola, Mujib Mashal, Megan Specia, Steven Lee Myers, Sui-Lee Wee, Claire Fu and Amber Wang, Javier C. Hernández, and Albee Zhang.