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South Korea coronavirus cases surge as Italy confirms first death from the virus Coronavirus claims lives of two passengers from Diamond Princess cruise ship, Japanese media says
(about 5 hours later)
For the third time in eight days — and the second time in 24 hours — Chinese public health officials made changes Friday to their criteria for counting coronavirus cases, once again sowing confusion over the widely fluctuating figures. In a further sign of potential inconsistencies, an official in China’s Hubei Health Commission suggested that agencies were not being transparent and accurate in their reported case numbers. Coronavirus claimed the lives of two passengers from the Diamond Princess Thursday, Japan's public broadcaster NHK reported, marking the first confirmed cruse ship deaths.
Another death amid a surge in coronavirus cases in South Korea — many traced to a church — also provoked fresh alarm Friday, after Chinese authorities reported hundreds of new infections at prisons, undercutting Beijing’s effort to show progress in containing the deadly epidemic. The Japanese man and woman, both said to be in their 80s, had left the ship last week and were hospitalized. Both passengers reportedly had underlying conditions.
The prison outbreaks underscored the high transmissibility of the virus, officially called SARS-CoV-2, in confined spaces. People on board the Diamond Princess cruise ship docked in Japan also have been hit hard by covid-19, the disease caused by the virus. Meanwhile, Chinese leader Xi Jinping is striking an increasingly confident note that the country can control the coronavirus outbreak and manage the economic and social fallout, as some Chinese health experts predict a peak in infections by the end of the month.
Meanwhile, Lebanon and Israel reported their first coronavirus cases, and infection numbers rose in Italy. By Friday night, Italy had reported its first death from the virus: a 78-year-old man. Authorities in Iran also reported two deaths among 13 new infections, raising the tally there to 18 cases. Chinese leaders, eager to kick-start economic activity, have dismantled some highway checkpoints, while businesses have begun to reopen. As of Wednesday, however, restrictions on personal mobility remained tight, suggesting wariness about rising infections.
Here are the latest developments: China on Wednesday reported that the rate of new cases continues to decline, but international experts, including Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, say they are wary of declaring that the pace of worldwide infections is slowing. Here’s what we know:
●A second person died of covid-19 and cases in South Korea soared, with investigators focusing on a church and hospital as clusters of infection in the southern city of Daegu. ● Beijing’s central Xicheng district said it would seal off residential compounds for almost half a million residents in one of the strictest control policies to reach the Chinese capital.
● Hundreds of passengers were disembarking from the Diamond Princess, but the massive case load left questions about the rigor of quarantine and testing procedures on board. ● China tallied a total of 394 new infections and 136 deaths through the end of Wednesday, making the cumulative total 74,546 infections and 2,118 deaths — the overwhelming majority still occurring in central Hubei province.
● Italy confirmed its first death from the virus Friday night. Earlier, Israel announced its first coronavirus case — a Diamond Princess passenger — while Lebanon reported its first infection — someone who had just traveled from Iran. ● Hong Kong reported its second death, a 70-year-old man.
● Beijing braced for a potential explosion of infection numbers in the capital after two hospitals were put under quarantine. ● New stricter criteria for diagnosing coronavirus cases will likely result in further drops in the rate of new infections reported.
● World Health Organization Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that Friday’s “significant decrease in confirmed cases is partly due to another change in the way China reports numbers.” ● In Japan, an infectious disease specialist slammed conditions on the Diamond Princess cruise ship, where 79 new cases were reported Wednesday, saying officials endangered lives by failing to observe proper quarantine practices.
Chinese health officials on Saturday morning reported 109 new deaths and 397 new confirmed coronavirus cases on Friday, bringing the country’s total to 2,345 deaths and 76,288 confirmed cases. ● Iran reported its first two cases of the virus, raising the number infected with the coronavirus in the Middle East to 12, including in Egypt and the United Arab Emirates.
Friday’s new cases were a dramatic drop from Thursday, when National Health Commission officials reported 889 new infections. The new tallies come as China has made even more changes to its criteria for counting coronavirus cases, causing confusion amid fluctuating numbers. ● The number of coronavirus cases in South Korea increased substantially Thursday, rising by nearly two-thirds to 82.
SEOUL — South Korea reported 142 additional cases of the coronavirus, Korea’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Saturday. A Japanese man and woman who were passengers on the Diamond Princess cruise ship died Thursday, according to Japanese public broadcaster NHK, marking the first time a cruise ship passenger has died.
About two-thirds of the new cases have been traced to an existing cluster at a hospital in southern Cheongdo County, North Gyeongsang province. The majority of the remaining cases are linked to a church in nearby city of Daegu, according to the KCDC. The 87-year-old man and 84-year-old woman died Thursday after being hospitalized on Feb. 11 and Feb. 12, respectively, according to NHK, citing government officials. Both passengers reportedly had underlying conditions and were confirmed to be infected with the new coronavirus.
South Korean government has designated Daegu and North Gyeongsang as “special care zones” to which support will be concentrated. At least 621 people have contracted the virus aboard the ship, with 79 new cases being confirmed Wednesday. Despite the new cases, hundreds of passengers who have tested negative for the new coronavirus began disembarking from the ship Wednesday as a 14-day quarantine ended.
The latest cases have brought up the national tally of the virus to 346, an 11-fold jump from the beginning of the week. Also on Wednesday, the first Diamond Princess crew member to test positive for coronavirus earlier this month was discharged from a Japanese hospital.
“Apart from the Diamond Princess cruise ship, [South] Korea now has the most cases outside China, and we’re working closely with the government to fully understand the transmission dynamics that led to this increase,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization, told a briefing in Geneva on Friday. The disembarkation of passengers is expected to continue through Friday.
On Friday, Iran’s health ministry announced two new deaths and 13 coronavirus cases, raising the total tally to 18 infections, including four deaths, since the first case there was announced Wednesday. Meanwhile, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Wednesday issued a “Level 1” travel warning for Japan, urging people to practice typical safety precautions when traveling to the country to prevent illness.
The spike in coronavirus cases have spurred panicked school closures and border restrictions aimed at curbing Covid-19’s spread. The CDC said it does not recommend canceling or postponing travel to Japan.
In response, the Tehran province ordered the closure of all schools on Saturday, which is a school day in Iran, state-run Fars News Agency reported. China’s National Health Commission early Thursday confirmed 394 new coronavirus infections, 1,117 suspected cases and 114 deaths nationwide in the past 24 hours, raising the country’s cumulative totals to 74,546 infections, 4,922 suspected cases and 2,118 reported deaths.
In the holy city of Qom, the center of Iran’s outbreak about 100 miles south of Tehran, authorities called for the suspension of religious gatherings and schools and seminaries. In its update, the health commission also said 1,779 people were discharged from the hospital Wednesday, bringing the total number of discharged patients to 16,155.
Iran is holding nationwide parliamentary elections Friday. South Korea reported 31 new cases of the coronavirus on Thursday, increasing its total by nearly two-thirds to 82.
Iran’s neighbors and allies have also reacted with travel bans and movement restrictions. On Friday, Lebanon’s health ministry announced that the country’s first coronavirus case was a 45-year-old woman who had just traveled from Qom to Lebanon, prompting the ministry to request that any visitors from Iran self-quarantine for 14 days, the virus’ incubation period. All of the latest cases except one in Seoul were in the southern city of Daegu and surrounding North Gyeongsang province, Korea’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC) said.
Turkey’s health minister on Friday announced tighter screening procedures of travelers from Iran and said the country would deny anyone showing symptoms of Covid-19. Turkey additionally said it would deny entry to Iranians who had traveled to Qom within the last 14 days. Of those, 23 cases were linked to church services that a 61-year-old known patient had attended, according to the KCDC.
On Thursday, Iraq, which neighbors Iran, suspended visas on arrival for Iranians. That same day Iraq and Kuwait, which is also along the Persian Gulf, both suspended direct flights to and from Iran. Shincheonji Church of Jesus released a statement on Wednesday that 10 churchgoers contracted the virus from the 61-year-old woman. The church in Daegu she attended has been shut since Tuesday and is currently undergoing investigations, the statement said.
Iraq, Turkey and Kuwait are all important business and trading partners with Iran, while Qom is a popular pilgrimage site among Shiite Muslims from all over. A patient being treated for novel cornoavirus at a San Diego hospital was released Wednesday after fully recovering from the virus, UC San Diego Health said in a statement.
Iranian authorities said that no one who tested positive with the disease had recently traveled to China. Minoo Mohraz, an Iranian health ministry official, told Iranian media that the virus “possibly came from Chinese workers who work in Qom and traveled to China,” the Associated Press reported. She provided no further evidence to back up the claim. A solar power plant in Qom is being built by a Chinese company. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention notified UC San Diego Health that a patient at the facility had fully recovered. The facility has worked closely with the CDC to receive individuals with symptoms to rule out the coronavirus infection.
Two more passengers evacuated from the Diamond Princess cruise ship and repatriated to Australia have tested positive for coronavirus, bringing the number of confirmed cases to six, according to the Austrlian Broadcasting Corp. “Patients who are cleared for hospital discharge have been confirmed through rigorous testing that includes consecutive negative test results provided by the CDC,” UC San Diego Health wrote in a statement. The facility said the patient discharged Wednesday is no longer under federal quarantine or isolation commands.
The announcement comes after Australian health authorities on Friday announced four people from the Diamond Princess has contracted the virus. UC San Diego Health was scrutnized last week when a confirmed coronavirus patient was mistakenly discharged due to a laboratory error. The patient was among three evacuees from China placed in isolation at the facility in early February and underwent testing after showing signs of the novel coronavirus.
“We will continue to screen every day and have that very precautionary approach to testing and ensuring that we are picking up early and isolating early anybody who is positive for COVID-19,” Austrailian medical officer Dianne Stephens told ABC. A coronavirus, recently named COVID-19, has infected more than 70,000 people since it was first reported in late 2019. To predict how big the epidemic could get, researchers are working to determine how contagious the virus is.
The satellite captured how concentrations of nitrogen dioxide, a pollutant released by burning fossil fuels, were down in China during this period – just when the government started to impose quarantines that dramatically cut the use of cars, flights, and freights that rely on coal and other fossil fuels. As governments and public health agencies work to treat infected people and control the spread of COVID-19, researchers are using mathematical models to estimate how contagious it is and how far it could spread. One such model has indicated that the number of cases may peak this month.
Weather conditions and seasonal patterns can affect pollution, but Jessica Seddon, an air quality specialist at the Washington-based World Resources Institute, said that’s unlikely the case here given the stark contrast between the two images. Nitrogen dioxide is also quick to decompose, so it’s typically been emitted where the satellite catches it, she said.
Seddon said “it’s very plausible the coronavirus would affect” nitrogen dioxide emissions, given the sudden cut in everyday activities from factory production to transportation.
In South Korea, coronavirus cases quadrupled over two days, as 144 members of a religious sect tested positive. In Singapore, clusters of infection have been traced to two churches, a hotel business meeting, a health products shop and a construction site. In Iran, an outbreak has seeded new cases in Lebanon and Canada — a worrisome sign that the disease could be spreading more widely than was realized.
There are outbreaks. There are epidemics. And there are pandemics, where epidemics become rampant in multiple countries and continents simultaneously. The novel coronavirus that causes the disease named covid-19 appears to be on the verge of that third, globe-shaking stage.
Amid an alarming surge in cases with no clear link to China, infectious disease experts think the flulike illness may soon be impossible to contain. The World Health Organization has not declared covid-19 a pandemic, and the most devastating effects, including more than 2,200 deaths, are still in China. But the language coming from the organization’s Geneva headquarters has turned more ominous in recent days as the challenge of containment grows more daunting.
“The window of opportunity is still there, but the window of opportunity is narrowing,” WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Friday. “We need to act quickly before it closes completely.”
If the coronavirus becomes a true pandemic, a large portion of the human population — a third, a half, two-thirds even — could become infected, although that doesn’t necessarily mean they will get sick. The word “pandemic” invokes fear, but it describes how widespread an outbreak may be, not its deadliness.
Read more here.Read more here.
A 78-year-old man who tested positive for coronavirus in Italy died late Friday, according to Corriere Della Sera, the country’s newspaper of record. As the number of coronavirus cases in China skyrocketed in the past week, a small Texas manufacturer was inundated with orders from 8,000 miles away. Then, Stephen K. Bannon reached out.
The death, which reportedly took place in the city of Padua, marks the first in Italy from the virus and comes as confirmed cases in the country continue to climb. Prestige Ameritech, the largest full-line domestic surgical mask manufacturer, was producing 600,000 masks each day but struggling to meet demand. Mike Bowen, the company’s executive vice president, received cold calls on his cellphone from people saying they represented foreign governments and wanted to make bulk purchases. The Hong Kong government and Hong Kong International Airport wanted more. Everyone was hunting for masks.
The newspaper, as well as the country’s ANSA news agency, reported 16 coronavirus cases in the country by Friday evening. Earlier in the day, ANSA confirmed the first cases of local transmission of coronavirus in Italy. Instead of celebrating the business boom, Bowen was indignant. This is the precise scenario he began warning about almost 15 years ago, when he pleaded with federal agencies and lawmakers to boost U.S. production of medical masks. He had predicted an eventual health scare and not enough manufacturers. He was right.
Officials say the first to locally contract the virus was a 38-year-old man in the northern region of Lombardy, who became sick after having dinner with a friend who recently returned from China. He then passed the virus on to his wife and another close friend, according to Reuters. So there Bowen was last week as a guest on Bannon’s “War Room: Pandemic” podcast, tormented that no one in power had listened. Bannon, a former top adviser to President Trump, has long cautioned about the decline of U.S. manufacturing.
Australian health officials confirmed Friday that four people who had gotten off the Diamond Princess cruise ship have tested positive for coronavirus, the Australian Broadcasting Corp. reported. “What I’ve been saying since 2007 is, ‘Guys, I’m warning you, here’s what is going to happen, let’s prepare,’ ” Bowen said on the program. “Because if you call me after it starts, I can’t help everybody.”
Two Queensland women, ages 54 and 55, and a South Australian woman, 24, are among the four who tested positive for the virus, the news station reported. The coronavirus outbreak has led to a health crisis, a diplomatic fiasco and, increasingly, an economic mess. It has also exposed major vulnerabilities in the medical supply chain. Many U.S. companies, especially hospitals and pharmaceutical firms, rely on Chinese manufacturers for products ranging from the active ingredients of prescription drugs to protective gear like masks and gloves. Now, much appears upended.
The 24-year-old woman initially tested negative for coronavirus in Yokohama, Japan, but started experiencing mild flulike symptoms when she arrived in Darwin, the capital city of Australia’s Northern Territory, the outlet reported. Read more here.
She will be flown to Royal Adelaide Hospital, where she’ll be treated in an isolated unit. The other two women will receive medical attention in Brisbane, according to the Australian Broadcasting Corp. Halfway around the world, the covid-19 outbreak is negatively affecting Chinese businesses in New York and San Francisco, and some Chinese community members are feeling targeted. Watch more here:
No details about the fourth patient were reported. Researchers have produced the first 3-D map of the coronavirus, a development that may help the development of a vaccine or antiviral medicine.
Brendan Murphy, Australia’s chief medical officer, told the outlet that the new diagnoses aren’t abnormal. The research, which maps the molecular structure of SARS-CoV-2, was published in the journal Science on Wednesday. A team at the University of Texas at Austin collaborated with researchers at the National Institutes of Health.
“Given there was continued evidence of spread of infection on board the Diamond Princess in recent days, the development of some positive cases after return to Australia is not unexpected, despite all of the health screening before departure,” he said. They were able to produce their 3-D atomic-level scale map of the part of the virus that attaches to and infects human cells. That part — called the spike protein — could prove essential as researchers race to produce a vaccine.
Australian passengers aboard the cruise ship arrived Thursday in Darwin, where many of the evacuees are being quarantined at an unused workers’ camp. They joined 266 other Australians who were moved out of Wuhan, the Australian Broadcasting Corp. reported. The team at Austin had already been studying other viruses in the coronavirus family and developing ways of locking their spike proteins into a shape that made them easier to analyze.
At least 46 Australians aboard the cruise ship were infected with the coronavirus, the outlet reported. “As soon as we knew this was a coronavirus, we felt we had to jump at it,” said Jason McLellan, associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin, who led the research, in a statement. “We knew exactly what mutations to put into this, because we’ve already shown these mutations work for a bunch of other coronaviruses.”
A coronavirus patient in China who was discharged after recovering from the illness has been readmitted because of another positive test result for the virus, Reuters reported. The researchers worked quickly, designing and producing samples of their spike protein within two weeks of receiving the genome sequence of the virus from Chinese researchers. It took roughly another two weeks to reconstruct the 3-D atomic-scale map.
The patient recuperated in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, and entered a recommended quarantine period at home, according to Reuters. McLellan’s team said they plan to work next on using the molecule they mapped to see if they can isolate antibodies produced by previously infected patients who have recovered from the virus — in hopes of producing a treatment for people soon after they are exposed to the virus.
The city’s public health clinical center told the news organizations that similar cases have been reported in other regions of the country. Sony Interactive Entertainment has decided to cancel its plans to attend a major video game showcase in Boston beginning Feb. 27 due to concerns about the coronavirus. The publishing company announced the decision Wednesday afternoon with a short update to an existing post on the event.
Patients who recover from coronavirus are advised to monitor their health for two weeks, wear face masks and limit their time outside to avoid contracting diseases, according to China’s National Health Commission. The showcase, Pax East, will run through March 1 and demo some of the major recent and upcoming game releases before a mass audience at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center. With both prominent game publishers and members of the general public, the expected crowd for the event figures to number in the tens of thousands.
In similar coronaviruses, 14 days is the longest incubation period that has been observed. “Today, Sony Interactive Entertainment made the decision to cancel its participation at PAX East in Boston this year due to increasing concerns related to COVID-19 (also known as ‘novel coronavirus’),” the post reads. “We felt this was the safest option as the situation is changing daily. We are disappointed to cancel our participation in this event, but the health and safety of our global workforce is our highest concern.”
At a daily media briefing Friday, WHO officials were asked repeatedly whether the coronavirus outbreak was likely to become a pandemic. The news comes after Boston released a statement confirming its first case of coronavirus in the state of Massachusetts.
In their responses, they seemed to take pains to avoid the p-word as much as possible. Sony was preparing to demo some of its most anticipated upcoming releases at the show and is preparing to release a new console, the PlayStation 5, this year.
The WHO officially defines a pandemic as “the worldwide spread of a new disease.” Many experts use the word to describe the stage of an outbreak when a virus is transmitting in a self-sustaining way across multiple countries and regions. In a statement to The Washington Post on Wednesday, Pax event director Kyle Marsden-Kish said Pax East will go on as planned, with “enhanced cleaning and sanitization across the show” based on the Environment Protection Agency’s recommendations in its emerging pathogen policy. “We are working closely with the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center and following local, state and federal public health guidelines, including those issued by the CDC,” Marsden-Kish said in a statement.
For now, most new coronavirus cases are still tied to China. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a new travel notice Wednesday for people headed to Hong Kong.
But Sylvie Briand, director of the WHO’s infectious hazard management department, said health investigators are concerned about the new cases spreading in Italy, Iran and elsewhere, with no clear link to China or contact with previously confirmed cases. The Level 1 warning asks travelers to exercise basic hygiene that includes hand washing and to avoid contact with sick people. The relatively mild warning comes shortly after Hong Kong reported a second death caused by coronavirus.
“I think one of the things people misunderstand when it comes to pandemics is it’s not about how severe it is or how many cases there are or even how worried we need to be,” said Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “It’s about literal geography.” Canceling or postponing travel plans wasn’t discouraged by the agency. However, the CDC recommended that a person seek medical attention if a visit to Hong Kong happened in the past 14 days and if symptoms of the virus are occurring.
The pandemic designation is not one that WHO officials will make lightly. That’s because it comes with massive political and economic consequences. Earlier this month, the agency issued a Level 3 travel notice to China that advised against nonessential travel to the country. Hong Kong, Macao and the self-governing island of Taiwan weren’t part of that warning.
The last time WHO declared a pandemic — during the H1N1 outbreak in 2009 — the decision later came under harsh criticism from some countries, which thought that it spread fear and led to unnecessarily aggressive responses. A Filipino crew member from the Diamond Princess cruise ship, the first among the crew to test positive for the coronavirus earlier this month, was discharged from a Japanese hospital Wednesday, according to a statement from the Philippines Department of Foreign Affairs.
H1N1, also known as swine flu, turned out not to cause the massive deaths and chaos some initially feared. But the pandemic declaration triggered requirements, for example, for some governments to buy vaccines — which a number of governments came to feel was a waste of money. He was admitted to a hospital on Feb. 5 and has been “successfully treated,” officials said.
There was even a mini-scandal when the WHO revised the definition it had published online during the 2009 outbreak, deleting a reference — after a reporter asked about it — to pandemics causing “enormous numbers of deaths and illness.” About 40 other Filipinos are still receiving medical care for covid-19 at facilities throughout the Tokyo metropolitan area, according to officials. That number includes six new cases that emerged Wednesday, among 79 new cases total on the Diamond Princess.
The Council of Europe accused the WHO afterward of changing the definition to make it easier to declare a pandemic. The WHO said the website was outdated and that it had not changed its definition. The Philippines Embassy in Tokyo is working with the Japanese government and Princess Cruises management to coordinate how and when Filipino crew and passengers aboard the cruise ship will be transported back to the Philippines, according to the statement.
BEIJING — Nie Mingtao arrived at Wuhan Union Hospital’s tumor center on Feb. 9, hoping to continue with chemotherapy treatment for the late-stage lung cancer that left him unable to eat or sleep. Wednesday was the last day of Japan’s government-enforced quarantine of the cruise ship. All other Filipino crew members and travelers will be allowed to enter the Philippines once they receive medical clearance, officials said.
When Nie showed up, paperwork in order, a doctor apologized and turned him away: The hospital was emptying its cancer ward to make room for patients suffering from the coronavirus that was ravaging Hubei province, said his son, Nie Wenjie. At least 621 people have contracted the virus aboard the ship. Crew members say they have not been afforded the same protections as passengers.
A month into its battle to contain the outbreak, China is overseeing an unprecedented triage on a national level by scaling back or suspending public health services for patients with ailments unrelated to the epidemic. Democratic senators sent a letter Wednesday to the Trump administration asking it to request emergency funding to supplement the government’s coronavirus response.
Within Hubei province at the outbreak’s epicenter, hospitals are so overwhelmed by the disease that they lack manpower or beds to treat nearly anything else. Beyond Hubei, hospitals from Chongqing in the southwest to Beijing in the north are choosing to shutter departments and reject patients seeking surgeries, kidney dialysis, diabetes medication and help for a variety of other conditions in an all-out effort to minimize the chance of virus transmission. In the letter, 25 senators expressed concern that the administration had not asked for supplemental funding to deal with the epidemic. Trump administration officials, the letter said, “continue to assert that there are already sufficient resources available, while providing few details on current or projected spending.”
A United Nations program said this week that one-third of Chinese living with HIV say they are at risk of running out of antiretroviral medication and that many don’t know how they can get their next refill. In a briefing to senators on Feb. 12, administration officials “stated that we must be prepared for a very large and lengthy public health response to this virus given how easily it appears to be transmitted,” according to the letter. “They also stated that [the Department of Health and Human Services] would exhaust existing funding for the response soon.”
“This is not right,” said Nie Wenjie, 28, this week from his rural village in northern Hubei as he watched his father heave and moan, his condition worsening. “All the lives not touched by the coronavirus — are those lives not worth saving?” In recent weeks, officials at the state level have expressed concerns over reimbursement for the mounting costs of coronavirus screenings and quarantines, along with staffing and equipment, under federally directed efforts to limit the outbreak’s reach in United States.
Read more: In China’s ‘war’ on coronavirus, hospitals turn away other patients — with dire results. The letter cites those worries. “We strongly urge the Administration to transmit an emergency supplemental request that ensures it can and will fully reimburse states for the costs,” the senators wrote.
Twenty-eight U.S. residents brought home from the Diamond Princess cruise ship Monday are infected with the coronavirus, and health officials expect to see more infections among that group in coming days, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced Friday. The letter also noted that President Trump’s recent budget proposal calls for a 9 percent cut in funding for the HHS, which includes the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — although officials said funding aimed at combating the coronavirus would be protected.
Eighteen of the Americans who were passengers on the cruise ship in Yokohama harbor had positive results in CDC tests, Messonnier said. Ten others showed positive results in tests conducted by the Japanese, but those results have not yet been confirmed by the CDC through additional testing. The CDC is not yet including them in their official count. Facebook criticized Singapore for invoking a controversial fake-news law to block a Facebook page, which the government said had been spreading misleading news about the coronavirus outbreak, among other concerns.
The 28 cruise ship passengers, along with three infected people previously returned from Wuhan, China, brings the total number of repatriated patients with the covid-19 infection to 31. Facebook told Reuters on Tuesday that it was legally obligated to comply with Singapore’s order this week to block the States Times Review’s page in Singapore, but that it was “deeply concerned” by the move.
That is more than double the 13 U.S. patients who so far have either picked up the infection by traveling to China or from close contact with a family member. Singapore last year passed the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act (POFMA), one of the world’s most far-reaching anti-misinformation laws.
The cruise ship passengers are “considered at high risk of infection and we do expect to see additional cases,” Nancy Messonnier, director of the agency’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said in a media briefing. The government had already used it to censor the page in question, which is run by an Australia-based Singaporean political activist. The most recent case concerned articles criticizing Singapore’s handling of the coronavirus, which the government said were inaccurate.
The Japanese government quarantined nearly 3,700 passengers and crew aboard the ship for nearly two weeks, a policy that resulted in widespread transmission of the virus. More than 600 people from the Diamond Princess have tested positive — the second-largest number of any place outside China. “The reason why we need to act swiftly is because if we don’t, then these falsehoods can cause anxiety, fear and even panic,” Singapore’s minister for communications and information, S. Iswaran, told reporters Monday, the Straits Times reported.
On Monday, the State Department flew 329 U.S. residents home from the ship on two separate aircraft. The Washington Post reported that the evacuation was delayed by a last-minute disagreement between government officials when 14 infections were found as the passengers arrived at the airport in buses. CDC officials did not want to put infected people on the plane with uninfected passengers, but were overruled by the State Department and another top government health official. Social media companies and governments around the world are grappling with their responses to an onslaught of disinformation around the coronavirus outbreak. Well before the epidemic, however, human rights groups and free speech activists warned that Singapore’s fake-news law would restrict freedom of expression.
At Friday’s briefing, the State Department said the tests for those 14 people were conducted 48 to 72 hours before they boarded the buses. “We believe orders like this are disproportionate and contradict the government’s claim that POFMA would not be used as a censorship tool,” Facebook said in a statement, according to Reuters. “We’ve repeatedly highlighted this law’s potential for overreach and we’re deeply concerned about the precedent this sets for the stifling of freedom of expression in Singapore.”
TORONTO — A plane carrying 129 Canadians and accompanying family members from the coronavirus-stricken Diamond Princess cruise ship in Japan has arrived in Canada, government officials said Friday. Iran’s first two coronavirus patients died Wednesday, hours after their infections were initially reported, a spokesman for the country’s health ministry wrote on Twitter.
The government-chartered flight landed at a Canadian air force base in Trenton, Ontario. The evacuees, who had already been quarantined aboard the cruise liner, must complete another 14 days of quarantine at a facility in Cornwall, Ontario, some 270 miles east of Toronto. The Iranians died in the holy Shiite city of Qom where they had been hospitalized after testing positive for the virus, Iran’s Mehr news agency reported.
Global Affairs Canada, the country’s foreign ministry, said that none of the passengers had symptoms of the coronavirus upon arrival. Anyone exhibiting symptoms was not allowed to board the plane in Tokyo. It is unclear whether anyone was turned away. Kianush Jahanpur, the health ministry spokesman, wrote that both patients died while in intensive care. The patients were under isolation, Reuters reported.
Of the 256 Canadians aboard the Diamond Princess, 47 tested positive for the virus and are being treated in hospitals in Japan. Iran’s deputy minister of health traveled to Qom on Wednesday, according to Mehr, and a team from the ministry’s contagious diseases department arrived there Tuesday to assist staff at the Qom University of Medical Sciences, where the patients were hospitalized. Jahanpur told Iranian media earlier Wednesday that a number of people in Qom had been isolated and tested after reporting flu-like symptoms.
Lolita Wiesner, a passenger who was repatriated, said in a Facebook post that “riotous applause” broke out when the plane landed in Trenton and that she is “glad to be on Canadian soil.” This sounds like great news: Drugmakers are starting to develop a coronavirus vaccine.
“Everyone we have seen since we landed has welcomed us home,” she wrote. “It made my eyes all weepy.” The downside: That’s because they believe the virus is so deadly that developing a vaccine is worth risking a lot of money.
World Health Organization officials said Friday they were particularly concerned with the appearance of coronavirus cases in several countries, in which it is unclear how the patients were infected. Drugmaker Johnson & Johnson has announced its Janssen unit will partner with the Department of Health and Human Services to work on a vaccine for the rapidly spreading coronavirus.
“Although the total number of cases outside Flag of China remains relatively small, we are concerned about the number of cases with no clear epidemiological link, such as travel history to Flag of China or contact with a confirmed case,” said WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. On Monday, a second drug company — Sanofi Pasteur — said it’s also partnering with HHS to work on creating a vaccine using the company’s recombinant DNA platform. Both drugmakers will work with HHS’s Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, otherwise known as BARDA.
Health officials are focused on determining whether instances of local transmission have occurred and where — because that would indicate containment is not working and that the outbreak is instead spreading geographically. “I think companies are looking at it in a way they hadn’t looked at it before because I think the disease itself is convincing people this has a potential to be around for a while,” said Michael Osterholm, the director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy.
Apart from the Diamond Princess cruise ship where local transmissions occured, South Korea now has the most cases outside China, and WHO officials said they’re working with the Korean government to understand the exact transmission dynamics that caused that increase. Janssen’s and Sanofi’s announcements are welcome news to government health officials, who have worried publicly that the pharmaceutical industry wouldn’t wade into vaccine development because they might never recoup enormous upfront costs — potentially $750 million to $1 billion — for a vaccine that won’t be ready until the epidemic has significantly slowed or even ended.
Iran is another hotspot WHO officials said they are focused on. In three days, Iran has gone from zero cases to 18 cases and four deaths. The WHO has supplied testing kits and said it plans to provide further support to Iran in coming days. Read more: Drugmakers are developing a coronavirus vaccine. That’s a sign the disease will be around a long time.
But the biggest concern, WHO officials said, continues to be the possible spread of the coronavirus to developing countries with weaker health systems that are ill-equipped to handle such an epidemic. Taiwan confirmed its 24th coronavirus diagnosis Wednesday, the Taiwanese Centers for Disease Control said in an announcement.
Because of that, Tedros said he would be meeting with African health ministers on Saturday to talk about their preparation efforts. Health officials said the latest patient is a woman in her 60s from the northern part of the island. She went to see doctors four times between Jan. 22 and Jan. 29 for symptoms that included coughing and a fever, authorities said.
Within China, Tedros said that although the number of cases in the epicenter Hubei province continues declining, “we are concerned about an increase in the number of cases in Shandong province, and we are seeking more information about that.” The woman’s condition worsened to the point that she had to be rushed to the emergency treatment unit of a hospital, where she was diagnosed with pneumonia. She was admitted for care on Jan. 30, but her health declined further. The woman was sent to the intensive care unit, then transferred to an isolation ward where she was diagnosed with coronavirus Wednesday, officials said.
BEIJING — Two hospitals have been put under quarantine amid fears of a coronavirus outbreak in China’s capital, with one district reporting an “infection density” second only to Wuhan, the epicenter of the epidemic. Authorities confirmed that the woman hadn’t been abroad for about two years. Health officials said they planned to investigate her contacts and activities over the past two weeks, in an effort to identify where she contracted the infection.
The sudden rise in cases in Beijing this week has people worried both about a potential explosion of infection numbers in the capital and what may happen as millions of Chinese return to work after weeks of relative isolation. The mounting death toll from the coronavirus raises a basic question: How does the virus make people sick, and why is it fatal for some?
Even the Global Times, a nationalist newspaper affiliated with the ruling Communist Party, described the increase in cases in Beijing this week as “whopping.” Scientists’ understanding of the new coronavirus is in flux, but it’s important to keep a few facts in mind: Most people who contract covid-19 — 80 percent, according to a study from Chinese public health officials — will experience only mild illness and recover. Based on early numbers, about 2 percent of people who are infected die — but that estimate comes with a huge caveat, given how hard it is to estimate fatality rates early in an outbreak.
There are 396 confirmed cases of the coronavirus in Beijing, a city of 22 million people. Haidian district has the most, with 61, while the much smaller area of Xicheng has 53, according to Beijing government figures. The difference between a lethal infection and one that feels like a bad cold probably hinges on the interaction between the virus and a person’s immune system, say researchers, who are relying on their knowledge of other similar illnesses, including severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS).
The central district of Xicheng — home to the Zhongnanhai compound that houses the offices of the Communist Party’s leaders, many government branches and the central bank — is second to Wuhan in the number of confirmed cases per about a half square mile, the Global Times reported. “What you get is the initial damage and rush of inflammatory cells, but the damage is so extensive that the body’s immune response is completely overwhelmed — which causes even more immune response, more immune cells and more damage,” said Matthew Frieman, a University of Maryland virologist.
That, along with entirely unconfirmed but persistent rumors in the capital that a senior member of the Communist Party has been infected, has led to speculation that the recent increase in security measures is designed to protect the nomenklatura. Coronaviruses that cause common colds are excellent at infecting the upper airway, while the virus causing SARS tended to go deeper in the lungs. As the coronavirus gains strength, Frieman said, dead cells are sloughed off and collect in the airway, making breathing difficult.
Read more here: Two Beijing hospitals quarantined amid fears coronavirus infections will spike in the capital In the patients who recover, the immune system’s response has worked: It has cleared the virus, with inflammation receding. Yet experts don’t know the long-term outcome for these individuals. It’s possible they will gain immunity and be protected from reinfection. Or they might get a less severe case in the future — or not be protected at all. They also might just gain temporary immunity. It’s yet another unanswered question about the coronavirus.
SEOUL — A South Korean church with a messianic leader was identified Friday as a hotbed of coronavirus cases as the outbreak grows in parts of the country. Read more here: How exactly does coronavirus kill?
The leader of the sect, Lee Man-hee, said all gatherings and other outreach have been suspended after health authorities linked Lee’s followers to more than two-thirds of all confirmed coronavirus cases in South Korea. SEOUL — North Korea maintained Wednesday that it does not have any coronavirus cases.
Lee denounced the coronavirus as a “devil’s deed” to curb the growth of his church, which extols Lee as a prophet-like figure who can decode hidden meanings from the Bible before a coming apocalypse. Critics describe Lee’s network as a cult. “Fortunately, no coronavirus case has been reported in our country to date,” Pyongyang’s Health Minister Oh Chun Bok told the official Korea Central Television.
The Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC) said more than two-thirds of South Korea’s 204 confirmed coronavirus cases are traced to Lee’s secretive religious movement, called Shincheonji Church of Jesus the Temple of the Tabernacle of the Testimony. “However, if we lower our guard just a little bit and let even one case of coronavirus infection occur, this can escalate into a disastrous fallout,” Oh told the state broadcaster.
KCDC Director Jung Eun-kyeong told reporters that Shincheonji services, which often gather followers in a crowded spaces, possibly led to mass transmissions. The World Health Organization said Tuesday that there are “no indications” of coronavirus cases in North Korea.
South Korean President Moon Jae-in called for a full investigation into transmission clusters at a Shincheonji church in Daegu, in South Korea’s southeast, and at a funeral in Cheongdo County. “At the moment there are no signals. There are no indications we are dealing with any covid-19 there,” Mike Ryan, head of the WHO’s emergencies program, said during a news conference in Geneva.
Read more here: South Korean coronavirus spike linked to doomsday sect with messianic leader South Korean media outlets had previously reported on a coronavirus outbreak in North Korea, citing unnamed sources there.
TOKYO — Tokyo Gov. Yuriko Koike said Friday it was inappropriate to suggest that London could host the 2020 Olympics if the coronavirus outbreak forces organizers to look for an alternative site. South Korea’s Unification Ministry spokesman Yoh Sang-key said Wednesday that the country could consider sending virus aid to North Korea, if asked. The country has yet to receive an official request from an international organization, however, he added.
On Wednesday, Shaun Bailey, the Conservative Party candidate in the London mayoral election, tweeted that London could host the Games, due to be held in the Japanese capital in July and August. “We have the infrastructure and the experience. And due to the #coronavirus outbreak, the world might need us to step up,” he wrote. After a health scare last weekend that sent health officials in several countries scrambling, test results now show that almost 800 passengers on a cruise ship docked in Cambodia do not have the coronavirus, Cambodian health officials said.
The International Olympic Committee said last week that it had been advised by the World Health Organization that there was no need for a contingency plan or to consider canceling or moving the Games. The cruise ship Westerdam was turned away by several ports in Asia before finally being welcomed by Cambodia. Some of the passengers were allowed to disembark and travel on to other countries because the ship was assumed to be virus-free. But on Feb. 15, one passenger — an 83-year-old American woman from the ship who went on to Malaysia — tested positive, prompting fears that other passengers may be carrying the virus.
Yet the number of cases in Japan has tripled to 92 since then, excluding cases on the quarantined Diamond Princess cruise ship that are counted separately, and officials said it is impossible to prevent the virus from spreading further. On Wednesday, Holland America Line, which operates the Westerdam, said 781 passengers tested negative for the virus that causes the disease now known as covid-19. “This completes the guests’ testing,” the company said in a statement.
Nevertheless, Japan’s chief government spokesman Yoshihide Suga said Friday the government would continue to prepare to host the Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics this summer as planned, adding that the IOC has “confidence” in Japan’s response to the virus. When the ship first left Hong Kong on Feb. 1, it carried 1,455 passengers and 802 crew members. Once it docked in Cambodia, roughly 674 passengers and 55 crew members disembarked and flew onward to other countries, including the United States. The rest were stopped by sudden restrictions on travel imposed as news of the 83-year-old woman’s positive test spread, Holland America spokesman Erik Elvejord said in an phone interview.
“We will coordinate closely with the IOC, the organizing committee and the Tokyo metropolitan government, and move ahead with preparations to make sure athletes and spectators can feel safe and secure throughout the games,” Suga told a news conference. Since then, the remaining 781 passengers and 747 crew members have been stuck in Cambodia. While some passengers will be allowed to disembark Wednesday, the crew members will remain aboard while they wait for their tests to be completed, Elvejord said.
On Feb. 19, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention moved Japan onto a Level 1 watch list, noting the virus had spread to the country, and advising travelers to practice “usual precautions” such as avoiding contact with sick people and washing hands with soap and water for at least 20 seconds. Foreign Minister Toshimitsu Motegi said nine countries have now placed some “restraint” on their citizens traveling to Japan. The 55 crew members who were able to leave previously were not tested, he added, and it is unclear what countries they returned to. Those crew members left because they had finished their contracts, he said.
Tokyo and Nagoya have both been forced to scale back marathons planned for March, only opening them to elite runners. On Friday, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party postponed a convention scheduled for March 8 at a Tokyo hotel, which was to be attended by about 3,000 party members, Kyodo News reported. Experts have cautioned that the Westerdam incident demonstrates how travelers without obvious symptoms could slip through screening processes because authorities have been focused on monitoring only those who traveled to China or had close contact with an infected person.
Japan’s Health Ministry has asked organizers to reexamine the need to hold big events, warning the risk of infection will increase if people are not given adequate personal space at indoor facilities, Kyodo reported. Singapore confirmed three new coronavirus cases, raising the country’s total to 84 infections.
Koike, Tokyo’s mayor, said Bailey was trying to make coronavirus a mayoral election issue, Agence France-Presse reported. Koike said the virus in her country has attracted global attention mainly because of the Diamond Princess cruise ship, which she emphasized was a British vessel. Singapore’s Health Ministry linked one of the patients to the Grace Assembly of God Church, which is the country’s biggest cluster, and another patient to the Life Church and Missions, Singapore’s Straits Times newspaper reported. The third person infected, however, had not recently traveled to China and was originally hospitalized in a shared room, following a dengue fever diagnosis.
The Olympics will run from July 24 to Aug. 9, with the Paralympics scheduled to take place from Aug. 25 to Sept. 6. The 57-year-old Singaporean woman was admitted to the hospital on Feb. 15 and moved to an isolation room after testing positive for the virus on Feb. 18. The Health Ministry said in a statement Wednesday that authorities are tracing and monitoring anyone that this third patient could have come in contact with.
Wuhan, the Chinese city hardest hit by coronavirus, plans to build 19 additional makeshift hospitals to care for patients, health officials announced Friday, according to Singapore’s Straits Times newspaper. “They [other patients] have been tested for covid-19 infection, and the results are pending,” the ministry said. “So far, none of the contacts have any respiratory symptoms.”
Hu Yabo, deputy mayor of the city, said the ad hoc hospitals will offer 30,000 beds beginning Tuesday, the newspaper reported. They will be equipped with CT scanners, EKG heart monitoring devices, and other necessary medical equipment. Singapore’s Ministry of Health also announced Wednesday that 34 coronavirus patients have been discharged. Of the 50 people who remain hospitalized, most are in stable or improving condition, although four are in a critical state in the intensive care unit, according to the ministry.
A factory that will be converted to a hospital will have the largest number of beds among the other temporary hospitals, the paper reported. Dozens of scientists joined the World Health Organization (WHO) on Wednesday in rebuking conspiracy theories on the origins of the coronavirus.
Hu said that Wuhan has 13 locations, including gyms and convention centers, which have been transformed into temporary medical facilities for ill patients, in addition to 9,313 beds for those with mild symptoms, the Straits Times reported. “The rapid, open, and transparent sharing of data on this outbreak is now being threatened by rumours and misinformation around its origins,” read an open letter published in the Lancet medical journal and signed by more than 20 scientists. “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that covid-19 does not have a natural origin,” they wrote.
A total of 13,348 beds are still open at these makeshift hospitals to receive coronavirus patients, according to China’s Global Times. “Conspiracy theories do nothing but create fear, rumours, and prejudice that jeopardise our global collaboration in the fight against this virus,” the authors added.
More than 70 medical professionals have been dispatched to treat ill patients in the city, where more than 45,000 cases of coronavirus were reported as of Thursday, according to the Straits Times. The letter was published as WHO representatives similarly rebuked conspiracy theories that the virus may not have natural origins. At a news conference on Wednesday, Richard Brennan, a regional emergency director with the WHO, said there is “no evidence that this virus was produced in a laboratory, and certainly no evidence that it was produced as a biological weapon.”
MANILA — Almost 50 people in quarantine north of Manila, most of them evacuated from the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak in China, have been declared virus-free and can now return to their homes. “This is one of the rumors that we need to snuff out very, very early,” he said, adding that the WHO is working proactively to debunk conspiracy theories via its digital channels.
Health officials announced Friday that the 49 individuals, who were in isolation for two weeks, were “well and safe.” Thirty were Filipinos previously based in Hubei province, while the rest were part of the repatriation team. A significant number of Chinese living with HIV are at risk of running out of medicines within days, warned the Joint U.N. Program on HIV/AIDS.
A send-off will be held for them Saturday, ahead of the arrival of new evacuees from the cruise ship Diamond Princess docked in Japan. At least 44 Filipinos on board the ship have contracted the virus. There were 538 Filipinos on the Diamond Princess, mostly crew members. The government is expecting between 460 to 480 to return to the Philippines on Sunday. The problem, said the organization, known as UNAIDS, is largely due to “lockdowns and restrictions on movement in some places in China” in response to the coronavirus outbreak.
World Health Organization officials said Friday that the number of coronavirus cases in China have dropped because of changes China has made — yet again — in how it is counting those numbers. In a survey conducted by UNAIDS and its regional partners earlier this month, almost one-third of more than 1,000 Chinese respondents with HIV said they feared being left without treatment in the next days.
The change in counting methods has frustrated and concerned epidemiologists around the world and sowed confusion in general, but WHO officials took pains to defend China’s decision, even as they appeared to admit that they have not been told the exact reason for the methodology change. “People living with HIV must continue to get the HIV medicines they need to keep them alive,” Winnie Byanyima, executive director of UNAIDS, was quoted as saying in a release Wednesday.
China started off counting only cases confirmed by laboratory testing, which led to concerns that the country was undercounting cases, especially as the number of cases climbed and overran the ability of Chinese labs to keep up. The country then switched to including cases that were “clinically confirmed” by doctors and clinicians in hospitals but not yet confirmed by labs. Then, the country announced Friday that it was switching back to counting only lab-confirmed cases. The program vowed to address the distribution difficulties through “a close partnership between the [Chinese] government and community partners.” The program’s China branch also said it would proactively seek to reach individuals at risk of running out of medicines.
“This may indicate the system in Wuhan has regained ability to test all suspected cases,” the WHO’s Tedros Adhanom said. When pressed on why China had made the previous change to including clinically confirmed cases, Tedros said, “We also understand they were using clinically confirmed cases; it could be because lab capacity was low because of the big number of cases.” Separately, the “Chinese National Center for AIDS/STD Control and Prevention has directed local authorities to ensure that nonresident people living with HIV can collect their medication wherever they are and has published and disseminated lists of antiretroviral therapy clinics,” UNAIDS added.
Global health experts have expressed concerns about the transparency of Chinese officials amid the outbreak, with many worrying that there is internal pressure by the country’s Communist Party to manipulate its numbers to show that it is making progress — a common practice among Chinese officials when it comes to such statistics as economic benchmarks and pollution measures. ISTANBUL — Iranian authorities have confirmed two cases of the coronavirus, the country’s first known infections, local media reported Wednesday.
WHO official Sylvie Briand defended China’s change, saying: “As we observed in other epidemics, it’s not unusual to count things in different ways as an epidemic evolves. … What is important in epidemiology when you observe an epidemic is to remember that surveillance or monitoring a disease aims at taking the best possible decision. It’s really numbers for action, not numbers for numbers.” Kianush Jahanpur, a Health Ministry official, said the cases were detected in the holy city of Qom and that a number of other people with flu-like symptoms have been isolated and are undergoing testing, according to the Iranian Students’ News Agency (ISNA).
Another frustration regarding China’s transparency is the inability of global experts to gain access to the epicenter of the outbreak in Wuhan. While WHO teams have been working in Beijing, Sichuan and Guangdong, Tedros said that on Saturday a WHO may finally be able to travel to Wuhan on Saturday. Jahanpur did not divulge the nationalities of those infected or elaborate on the number of people suspected of having the virus. He said that specialized medical teams were deployed to Qom to detect potential cases of the virus, which first emerged in China in December.
The United Arab Emirates announced two new cases of coronavirus Friday, in addition to nine that had been identified in the past few weeks. “In the past two days, suspicious cases of influenza were detected in the city of Qom,” Jahanpur said, ISNA reported.
The two new patients had come in contact with a Chinese citizen who was identified as having contracted the virus Sunday, the Ministry of Health and Prevention said. The 37-year-old was the sixth Chinese citizen found to have the disease in the United Arab Emirates, whose Dubai International Airport is one of the world’s largest travel hubs. “Initial testing showed two positive cases for coronavirus, while some other [patients] were reported to have Type B influenza,” he said, adding that further testing was being conducted.
The ministry said the two new patients, one from the Philippines and one from Bangladesh, are both in stable condition. Earlier this month, Iran evacuated more than 50 Iranian nationals — as well as Iraqi, Lebanese and Syrian nationals — from the Chinese city of Wuhan where the outbreak of the virus originated. The evacuees were flown to Tehran and quarantined for two weeks, according to local media reports.
The two new cases bring the total number of people with covid-19 in UAE to 11, three of whom had been confirmed as fully recovered. As of Sunday, six remained under intensive care, the ministry announced then. There has been no update provided on the condition of the six since. The report came just hours after WHO officials in Cairo noted that no new countries have been added to the list of those affected in a few days.
The statement came on the heels of the announcement of the first virus case in another Arab country, Lebanon. Health ministers from gulf states held an emergency meeting in Saudi Arabia’s capital Wednesday “to discuss growing concerns over the novel coronavirus,” the Emirati News Agency said. The World Health Organization (WHO) said Wednesday that it was working to increase preparedness in North Africa and the Middle East for a possible outbreak of the coronavirus, promising the delivery of more essential medical supplies.
U.S. stock markets plunged Friday as signs of the coronavirus’ chilling effect on the global economy continued to surface in earnings and manufacturing data. The Dow Jones industrial average was down more than 300 points in midmorning trading. Egypt recently reported its first case of the virus, amid mounting concerns that it could spread in other parts of Africa, which analysts have cautioned are ill-equipped to handle an outbreak. More than 1 million Chinese citizens are estimated to work in Africa.
Investor fears were reflected in gold’s extended rally, which lifted the safe-haven 1.3 percent to a seven-year high. Meanwhile, the yield on the 30-year Treasury fell to an all-time low, suggesting that investors’ confidence in the economy has been shaken. Speaking in Cairo on Wednesday, Richard Brennan, a regional emergency director with the WHO, said laboratories in 20 out of 22 countries in the Eastern Mediterranean region are now capable of diagnosing the virus. Speeding up tests has been considered crucial in quickly confirming cases and identifying other individuals who were potentially exposed to the virus.
“While the number of new cases of coronavirus continues to slow in China, the spread outside the country is escalating and it seems the market is waking up to the impact on both individual companies and the wider economy,” Russ Mould, investment director at AJ Bell, wrote in commentary Friday. “Profit warnings linked to the health crisis, as companies are either hit by slowing consumer demand in China or impact on their supply chain, are starting to trickle out with the impact on iPhone sales revealed by Apple earlier this week the most high profile of these.” Brennan also said the WHO was distributing essential supplies, including gloves, masks, medical gowns and respirators.
Fresh Purchasing Managers index data revealed that U.S. economic output shrank for the first time since October 2013 in January, the contraction driven by a severe drop-off in the services sector. Services business activity fell to 49.4 in February, down from 53.4 in January, the report showed. Figures under 50 indicate a contraction, while figures over 50 indicate growth. “There has been a tendency for some countries to start hoarding some of these materials, these essential supplies,” he said. “But we’ve got to make sure that the supplies get to people who need them. So, WHO is working with the manufacturers [and] with governments to make sure that supplies are freed up and appropriately and fairly distributed across the globe in the spirit of solidarity.”
Read more: Dow drops 300 points as evidence of coronavirus fallout continues to emerge Brennan added that while there have been encouraging trends of decreasing numbers of new cases around the world, “we have to be vigilant, we cannot be complacent.” He said the WHO would continue working on preparedness around the region.
The Pyongyang marathon in April has been canceled as North Korea shuts its borders and limits travel, according to a tour agency that operates there. “We are not at a turning point yet,” he added.
The marathon, which snakes around North Korea’s capital city, has been open to international competitors since 2000. It is recognized as one of about 100 “label road races” by World Athletics, the international governing body for athletics and most running sports. BEIJING — Chinese national health authorities have released stricter guidelines for how coronavirus cases are diagnosed, which could decrease the rate of new cases in the outbreak’s epicenter.
North Korean officials and the World Health Organization have both said the country is free of any cases of the coronavirus. Nonetheless, analysts of the isolated country have speculated that there could be cases after Pyongyang ordered schools closed for the next month and put foreigners under a month-long quarantine. In the sixth edition of its diagnostic criteria released Wednesday for covid-19, as the disease is called, the National Health Commission eliminated the distinction between how cases would be classified in Hubei province and other regions. Cases will now be reported under two categories: “suspected cases” and “confirmed cases,” the document said.
During the height of the Ebola epidemic, the 2015 Pyongyang marathon was closed and later reopened to foreigners, Reuters reported at the time. Moving forward, cases can only be described as “confirmed” if they stem from a positive result in a nucleic acid test.
A separate marathon in September is still set to go ahead in Pyongyang, according to Young Pioneer Tours, one of several companies that operates trips for foreigners to North Korea. Hubei officials surprised the world last week when they loosened their diagnosis criteria and began classifying as “confirmed” cases that were only clinically diagnosed by physicians. The move, which was not followed by other provinces, led to a dramatic surge in newly reported cases in Hubei to 10 times the previous rate. Chinese officials said the change was necessary due to the prevalence of undercounting inside the virus-ridden province.
Otto Warmbier, a U.S. college student, had entered the country on a Young Pioneer Tours trip before his arrest and death. It’s unclear if the new guidelines will now lead to an equally dramatic drop in new cases.
A British repatriation flight scheduled to carry more than 70 Britons quarantined on the Diamond Princess cruise liner has been delayed, according to the British Embassy in Japan. The prevalence of coronavirus patients showing mild or no symptoms has been a challenge for public health authorities worldwide, who say it is difficult to screen for carriers.
The flight, initially scheduled for Friday night, will now leave early Saturday. Organizing the flight was “logistically complicated,” the embassy told the BBC. The departing passengers will be allowed to leave the quarantined ship on Friday instead. Experts, including top Chinese scientists, have called into question the accuracy of the nucleic acid tests, which examine genetic material from swabs of the mouth and throat. State media have also reported that case counting inside Hubei has been bottlenecked by the limited number of labs that can process samples.
The Diamond Princess, carrying more than 3,700 passengers and crew members, has provided one of the most dramatic plotlines in the coronavirus saga. A team led by top Chinese pulmonologist Zhong Nanshan said this week that he has been developing an antibody test that should give conclusive results more quickly and accurately.
Ten people on board were initially diagnosed with the disease in early February. Since then, while the ship has remained under quarantine in Japan’s Yokohama harbor, 634 on board have tested positive for the virus. TOKYO — Hundreds of passengers who have tested negative for the new coronavirus began disembarking from the Diamond Princess cruise ship Wednesday as the 14-day quarantine ended, even as another 79 people from the ship have been found to have the virus.
That total includes four Britons, but Saturday’s repatriation flight will carry only those who have tested negative. The latest figures from the Japanese Health Ministry bring to 621 the number of people on board the ship who have the virus, according to Japanese media. Those testing positive will be taken to isolation facilities or hospitals depending on their level of symptoms, while those who have tested negative are finally being freed.
When it departs Japan on Saturday morning, the United Kingdom-bound flight will land at Boscombe Down military base. The arriving passengers will then be quarantined for an additional 14 days at Arrowe Park Hospital. People whose travel companion contracted the virus have been asked to serve out an additional 14-days quarantine, starting from the date at which their cabin mate was removed from the ship.
Nine people in Britain have tested positive for coronavirus so far. At around noon, people wearing masks and carrying their suitcases began descending from the boat one after another, some walking alone and some in pairs between cones toward a fleet of buses waiting to take them to a nearby station in the Japanese city of Yokohama, just outside Tokyo.
Lebanon confirmed its first case of coronavirus on Friday, Health Minister Hamad Hassan said in a news conference, adding that the patient was a 45-year-old woman who arrived in Lebanon from Iran on Thursday. “When I learned that they decided to disembark us, I really could not help but cry with joy,” an elderly man told reporters as he was descending from the bus, according to a video posted on the NHK website. “I just wanted to get out as soon as possible.”
Hassan said the Lebanese patient, who flew to the capital, Beirut, from Qom, Iran, was placed in quarantine. He also confirmed two other suspected cases and designated a hospital in Beirut as an isolation center for those who show symptoms. Many people described how their worries had grown as more and more people on board the ship tested positive for the virus and were taken away to hospitals.
Hassan also requested that any Iranian visitors self-impose quarantine in their residences for 14 days, until they confirm they have not contracted the virus. Iran has confirmed a total of 18 cases so far, including four deaths from covid-19, centered in Qom, a Shiite holy city south of Tehran. “It was tiring, but I am so relieved now,” said a 77-year-old man who was traveling with his 70-year-old wife, according to Yomiuri Shimbun.
The health minister and the head of the Lebanese Red Cross warned against the spread of hysteria after voice notes and false news circulated via messaging services and on social media in Lebanon, including a rumor that two dead bodies were on the plane — which the minister denied. The disembarking of the passengers is expected to continue through Friday.
Hassan emphasized the importance of preventive treatment at this stage. “Do not mix with those infected with respiratory diseases who are isolated at home,” Hassan said during the news conference. “Leave your neighbors in their houses: now is not the time for visits.” BEIJING — A new paper by researchers at China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention said that more than 100 people in China had been infected with the novel coronavirus by the end of 2019, suggesting the possibility of underreporting by health authorities or mishandled responses by local governments in the early days of the outbreak.
MOSCOW — Ukrainian model Anastasiya Zinchenko refused to be evacuated from Wuhan, the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak, because she was not allowed to take her dog with her, she wrote Thursday on Instagram. The paper, published by Chinese Journal of Epidemiology, revealed for the first time that 104 people had already showed coronavirus pneumonia symptoms as of Dec. 31, 2019, and that 15 of them later died. The epidemiologists from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention analyzed 72,314 patient records nationwide as of Feb. 11 — both confirmed and suspected cases — and found that more than 5,000 of them had been put under medical observation as early as last December.
Still in Wuhan with Misha, her Pomeranian pup, Zinchenko received a phone call Friday from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, posting video of the exchange on Instagram. Zelensky’s office confirmed that he called Zinchenko, according to the BBC’s Jonah Fisher. The new finding contrasts with official accounts from the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission, which confirmed on Jan. 3 only 44 infections and reported no deaths, saying that 121 people who had come into contact with those confirmed patients were under medical observation. It went on to say that only half of the people with those early infections had visited the Huanan Seafood Market, a popular market associated with sales of exotic game meat and widely believed to be the origin of the ongoing outbreak.
“We won’t leave you there,” Zelensky says to Zinchenko in the video, adding that he only recently heard of her situation. After Jan. 1, the rate of new infections associated with the seafood market had dropped to 8.6 percent, as the epidemic started to explode through community transmission, the paper said. Through retrospective analysis, the authors pointed out that by Jan. 10, the virus had spread to 20 out of 31 provinces, regions and municipalities. However, China’s National Health Commission did not announce the first infection outside Hubei — a case in Guangdong province — until Jan. 19.
Zinchenko said the Ukrainian Embassy initially told her she would not be allowed to evacuate with the dog but later relented on the condition that “everything meets the sanitary standards.” She said she got veterinary approval but was then told by the Ukrainian Embassy that Chinese authorities refused to let the dog evacuate with her. BEIJING — Chinese cities are slowly coming back to life as the government gains confidence in its ability to control the epidemic.
“I wanted to call you personally because I find it very important,” Zelensky told Zinchenko. “We will surely find means and ways.” Shanghai and a dozen other Chinese cities have allowed office buildings, shopping malls, and restaurants to reopen this week, but with extra measures taken to reduce the risks of virus spread, local media reported Wednesday.
SEOUL — South Korea on Friday reported its second death from the new coronavirus, according to the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC). While a number of businesses have encouraged employees to work from home, more and more white-collar workers are tiptoeing back to downtown Shanghai’s dense skyscrapers — albeit with some safety measures. The 88-story Jinmao Tower, which houses branch offices of big state banks, IT companies and an upscale Hyatt hotel, have required tenants on different floors to clock in at different hours of the day to reduce mass gathering.
The woman in her 50s died after being diagnosed with the virus at Daenam hospital in Cheongdo, in the southern North Gyeongsang province. Other buildings have limited the number of passengers for elevators; for instance, the Hongqiao R&F Center allows no more than four people in one ride at the same time, while the HKRI Taikoo Hui commercial complex put the upper limit at six.
The hospital has recorded 16 coronavirus cases, including South Korea’s first death from the virus on Thursday, according to the KCDC. Of the 16, five were doctors and staff members at the hospital. The city government said Tuesday that a third of storefronts have also reopened. Smaller restaurants in Shanghai remain closed, and the few that are open have either opted for takeaway only or kept eating-in customers as far apart as possible. The food court in Shanghai Center has kept only a third of its tables and allowed only one customer per table; in addition, tables are placed at least three feet away from each other.
The woman had been hospitalized at Daenam and was transferred to a bigger hospital in nearby Busan after contracting the virus. She died around 6.p.m. Fast-food chains and coffee shops including KFC and Starbucks are introducing a “no-touch” service, which asks customers to place orders on smartphone apps or a self-service machine and then get their food or drinks at a pickup table away from the cashier.
KCDC Director Jung Eun-kyeong told reporters Friday that the confined environment at Daenam hospital’s locked psychiatric ward could have given rise to transmissions there. It was not immediately clear if the woman had been hospitalized at the psychiatric ward. Some 200 miles away in Nanjing, the provincial capital of Jiangsu, major shopping malls and department stores — the Central, Golden Eagle, Cenbest and the House of Fraser — reopened Wednesday morning with temperature checks at entrances, while most offices, cinemas and other indoor venues remain closed. Clinics and outpatient departments at public hospitals also resumed service, but dental clinics and the departments of oral medicine, ophthalmology, otolaryngology and plastic surgery are closed until further notice.
The KCDC is investigating the hospital’s link to a bigger cluster of coronavirus infections at a church in the nearby city of Daegu. Intercity bus services and subway systems in Suzhou and several other cities in Jiangsu province have returned to normal operation this week. On Tuesday alone, more than 110,000 passengers took the subway in Suzhou, and all of them had to register their personal information before a security check. Parks, gardens and outdoor sports facilities are now open to public, but with security in place to control human flow.
More than two-thirds of South Korea’s 204 coronavirus cases are traced to the Daegu church, according to the KCDC. Hangzhou, the home city of e-commerce giant Alibaba, announced Tuesday that roadblocks and temporary checkpoints inside the city would be dismantled. On Wednesday morning, social media was abuzz with excitement because traffic jams were reported in some parts of the city, signaling an increasing number of cars back on the road. The city’s West Lake scenic area reopened Wednesday, cutting the daily quota of visitors by half and requiring all to wear masks inside.
Iran raised its coronavirus count Friday, reporting two deaths among overall 13 new confirmed cases, the state-run Mehr News Agency reported. Three malls owned by Yintai Group have reopened, requiring temperature checks, real-name registration and closing two hours earlier than normal. By Thursday, all businesses in the services sector will be allowed to reopen.
On Wednesday, two elderly Iranians were the first in the country reported to both have and then die of covid-19. So far, there have been 18 cases in total, according to Iran’s health ministry. Malls and wholesale markets in other cities — from Kunming in the west to Yiwu in the east, from Changchun in the north to Sanya in the south — have also reportedly reopened this week.
The outbreak has centered in the Shiite holy city of Qom, where authorities have closed all schools and seminaries and requested the suspension of religious gatherings. Wuhan, the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak, and the wider Hubei province remain under strict quarantine.
Kianoush Jahanpur, a Health Ministry spokesman, said the latest cases all involved people either from Qom or who had recently visited there, Mehr reported. MANILA — Select commercial flights from China to the Philippines will be available despite the travel ban, the Department of Foreign Affairs announced Wednesday.
In response to the outbreak, neighboring Iraq and nearby Kuwait banned travelers from Iran. The two countries both have citizens who frequently travel to Iran for pilgrimages, as well as strong business and trade ties. In a public advisory, the department said Filipinos who wish to return to the Philippines can board flights out of Beijing, Chengdu, Chongqing, Guangzhou, Guiyang, Kunming, Shanghai and Xiamen.
Israel’s Health Ministry confirmed Friday the first case of an Israeli citizen having contracted covid-19 while aboard the Diamond Princess cruise ship, docked in a port in Japan. The female patient is under supervision and in isolation, the ministry said, according to Israeli media. All returning Filipinos must undergo a mandatory 14-day quarantine.
Officials stressed that the patient did not contract the virus in Israel. The Philippines eased its travel ban on China and its special administrative regions on Tuesday, when it allowed overseas Filipino workers, permanent residents and students to return to Hong Kong and Macao.
Eleven Israeli citizens were among the more than 3,000 passengers and crew quarantined on the cruise liner after a coronavirus outbreak on board. In total, 634 of the ship’s occupants have tested positive for the virus and two have died of covid-19, according to Japanese health authorities. At least 200,000 Filipinos reside or work in China. Earlier this month, 45 Filipinos were repatriated from Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak.
The 11 Israelis were flown out of Japan and sent directly Friday into isolation at Sheba Tel Hashomer Hospital, where they will remain for a quarantine period. BEIJING — Xicheng district, one of Beijing’s most central locales and the site of the Chinese government’s central headquarters, is tightening restrictions and increasing tests for more than 489,000 households in one of the most significant changes in epidemic-control policies in the capital.
In an effort to prevent the entry of the virus into Israel, Israel’s government on Monday announced a temporary travel ban on all foreign nationals who in the past 14 days had traveled to Thailand, Singapore, Hong Kong and Macao. Sun Shuo, deputy secretary of the district’s Communist Party committee, said Tuesday that all residential compounds that have conditions for closed-off management will be locked down, and the government has formulated specific measures for bungalows and compounds without property companies to ensure that “no blind spots are left.”
Thailand has asked Israel to reconsider including it on the ban, which affects about 25,000 Thai workers employed largely in agriculture in Israel. News had been circulating online that a government employee in Xicheng was diagnosed with the coronavirus, leading to the shutdown of government work in the district. Sun confirmed that the unnamed government employee was infected while carrying out epidemic-control work in central China and then drove back to Beijing.
BEIJING — Reporting of case statistics at the epidemic epicenter in China appeared to descend into disarray Friday as public health officials said they had been ordered to change how they count cases for the third time in eight days — and the second time in 24 hours. Sixty-nine close contacts and people with high risks have been placed under centralized medical observation, but Sun said government agencies in the district are operating normally.
In remarks to the state news agency Xinhua, a Hubei Health Commission official suggested that agencies were not being transparent and accurate with their reported case numbers at a time when statistics have fluctuated wildly and inconsistencies have emerged in Chinese official data. A total of 393 confirmed cases have been reported in 15 districts in Beijing so far, with 52 from Xicheng.
Tu Yuanchao, deputy director of Hubei’s health commission, told Xinhua on Friday that the newly installed Communist Party chief of Hubei province, Ying Yong, reversed an earlier decision to deduct coronavirus cases that were not confirmed by genetic tests from the total case number, which included diagnoses made by physicians. BEIJING — Chinese Minister of Public Security Zhao Kezhi on Tuesday warned police officials and local administrators against excessive and “crude” use of force after a spate of videos surfaced showing officers tackling and roughing up citizens who refuse to wear masks.
The order from Ying, the former Shanghai mayor brought in by the Communist Party leadership to take charge in Hubei, reversed an earlier move that allowed the province to report sharply lower numbers as the Chinese government looks to present an image of normalcy slowly returning across the country this week. As a result, Hubei announced a sharp surge in new cases again on Friday to more than 1,000 — as well as the startling revelation that the coronavirus was spreading inside prisons and has infected hundreds of inmates, without the information being disclosed to the public. Chinese citizens are generally not known to hold urban beat cops, known as chengguan, or an array of semiformal security enforcers, in particularly high esteem. Now, one month into the full-blown epidemic, tempers are running particularly hot as countless Chinese cities and villages live under severe restrictions on movement.
“Next, we will further strengthen discipline and tighten management to ensure the openness and transparency, timeliness and accuracy of epidemic statistics,” Tu was quoted by Xinhua as saying. The Chinese Internet has been suffused with online videos showing residents facing off with police. Women have been pinned on the ground for refusing to wear masks. One officer fired his gun after he was swarmed by locals angry about quarantine policies. Local inspectors slapped three people playing mah-jongg, leading to a furious confrontation with pajama-clad players. Brawls sometimes break out.
A senior-ranking official in the Communist Party’s political and legal apparatus also warned cadres on Friday in a widely disseminated speech that “hiding” cases or manipulating numbers will no longer be tolerated. The latest video to cause a sensation showed a man in Henan province being bound by rope against a pillar outside a building while a man in hazmat suit berated him for not wearing a mask or registering his movement.
Inconsistencies in China’s epidemic data, particularly in Hubei, have presented frustrations for biostatisticians trying to gain a crucial understanding of how the outbreak is progressing. After the video surfaced, local Henan officials this week sent a terse reminder to villages that epidemic prevention and control work must be done “in accordance with laws and regulations,” according to the Southern Metropolis newspaper.
Statistics in China are politically sensitive, and Communist Party officials at every level are rewarded or punished based on their performance against certain numerical benchmarks. TOKYO — A Japanese infectious disease specialist has condemned the “chaotic” and “scary” conditions on board the Diamond Princess cruise liner, saying a lack of infection control risked the lives not only of the passengers and crew but also of the officials and medical staff working on the ship.
In one particularly glaring moment that drew ridicule this week, Wuhan, a city with one-sixth the population of Hubei, reported twice the number of new coronavirus cases as the entire province. Kentaro Iwata of Kobe University said he had gained access to the ship Tuesday and was appalled by a “completely inadequate system of infection control on board.”
Six people in a city near Milan have tested positive for coronavirus, marking the first cases of local transmission of the virus in Italy, the country’s ANSA news agency reported. After several hours trying offer constructive advice on how to improve procedure, he was thrown off the ship, but was so worried he recorded YouTube videos in Japanese and English exposing his findings. The Japanese version has already been viewed more than 710,000 times.
Officials say the first to locally contract the virus was a 38-year-old man in the northern region of Lombardy, who became sick after having dinner with a friend who recently returned from China. Iwata said he had worked in Africa during the Ebola outbreak, in China during the severe acute respiratory syndrome epidemic, as well as during cholera outbreaks.
He then passed the virus on to his wife and another close friend, according to Reuters. “I never had fear of getting infection myself, for Ebola, SARS, cholera, because I know how to protect myself, how to protect others and how infection control should be,” he said. “But inside the Diamond Princess, I was so scared.”
ANSA reported that the man is in serious condition, including respiratory insufficiency, and has been admitted to the intensive care unit at a hospital in Codogno, about 35 miles southeast of Milan. Both other patients have also been hospitalized. Already 542 people on the cruise ship have been found to have the virus, out of 2,404 people tested, with results still awaited on the final 1,300 tests.
After initially reporting three cases, Italian officials raised the count Friday to six. Four people working on or around the ship during the quarantine period have also contracted the virus, including a quarantine officer, a Health Ministry official, an ambulance driver and a medical staffer.
Local police have since tried to retrace the couple’s steps over the past four days, including where they went to work, exercised and had contact with other people, ANSA reported. The 38-year-old man’s family and the friend who came from China have all been placed in isolation. Normal infection control involves establishing a red zone, where the virus is present and protective gear must be worn, and a green zone, which is safe, Iwata said. There was no such demarcation on board the ship, with people wearing protective suits mingling with and eating alongside unprotected people, and people even eating food and handling smartphones without removing gloves and clothing that could carry the virus.
As of Tuesday, about 40 cases of the novel coronavirus had been confirmed elsewhere in Europe. “It was completely chaotic,” he said. “I was so scared of getting covid-19 because there was no way to tell where the virus is, no green zone, no red zone — everywhere could have the virus.”
Correction: An earlier version of this post reported incorrectly that the three new cases were Italy’s first coronavirus infections. They were the first cases of local transmission. Iwata said “bureaucrats were in charge of everything” without a single professional infection control specialist on board. When a crew member went to a nurse with a fever, the nurse didn’t even bother protecting herself, because she had concluded she must have already caught the virus, he said.
YOKOHAMA, Japan — When Wayne and Susan Hidalgo heard that a fellow passenger on the Diamond Princess had been diagnosed with the new coronavirus, he was not too worried. He has since returned to his home in Kobe, but has isolated himself in a room for fear of infecting his family, and will not return to work for around two weeks for fear of infecting colleagues and patients. But he said he feared doctors and nurses working on board will return to medical centers around the country with the virus, and could infect patients.
When he discovered that one of the people he regularly dined with on board had shared a bus with the infected passenger on a shore excursion, he didn’t think too much about it, at first. Responding to Iwata’s complaints, Japan’s chief government spokesman Yoshihide Suga said the government had been “implementing measures to prevent the spread of the infection thoroughly.”
“But as time went on, after a day or so, I wondered, why are we eating dinner with these people? Why is everybody out dancing? Why are they having these shows going on?” the 77-year-old from Kansas City said by telephone from his hospital bed in Tokyo. SEOUL — South Korea confirmed 15 new cases of the new coronavirus infection on Wednesday, raising the national tally to 46.
Japan’s Health Ministry says 88 Americans on board the ship have been diagnosed with covid-19, with most taken to hospitals. Some 14 people with the virus were controversially allowed to board charter flights bound for California and Texas, after their test results came back just before they were due to take off. Of the new cases, 13 were in Daegu city and the surrounding southwestern province of North Gyeongsang, with 11 of them linked to a previously confirmed patient, according to Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC).
That left many Americans behind in Japan searching for answers. The 61-year-old woman is believed to have infected 10 people who attended the same church, and one person who came in contact at her hospital.
The Hidalgos’ children want them to be brought home, arguing that it’s “not fair” they’ve been left behind in Japan while other Americans have been brought home. She started displaying symptoms of fever around Feb. 10 and tested positive for the virus on Tuesday, according to the KCDC.
Susan, 76, says they just want to get back to Kansas City, but Wayne says he knows that isn’t going to happen until they are given the all-clear by Japanese doctors, for which they each need two successive negative tests. The agency has identified 166 people who came in contact with the woman, who are now in quarantine at home or in hospitals. It said it would conduct a close inspection of the church and test more churchgoers for the virus.
Wayne says he is suffering from mild pneumonia, and has been put on oxygen, but only had a fleeting fever. He’s taking antibiotics, but doctors haven’t felt it necessary to put him on antiretroviral tablets that are being given to the most severely ill patients. Susan doesn’t have any symptoms. MANILA — There are now 41 Filipino crew members on board the Diamond Princess cruise ship infected with the novel coronavirus, health officials said Wednesday, an increase of six from a day earlier.
An official from the U.S. Embassy has paid a visit, bringing them some clothes and some local currency, while Princess Cruises, the owner of the ship, has been in regular contact, with their Tokyo representative calling every day. The patients have been brought to hospitals in Japan, where the ship is moored, and will be unable to return to the Philippines even as the government aims to repatriate other Filipinos this week.
But he does wonder if the cruise liner operator “dropped the ball” by allowing passengers to continue to mingle freely with each other for two to three days, after news broke that the passenger from Hong Kong had been infected. Only those who are asymptomatic and who tested negative for the virus will be allowed to board a flight. They will still be subject to a 14-day quarantine.
MOSCOW — Ukrainians evacuated from the Chinese city of Wuhan, the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak, were met with protests and violence Thursday upon arriving back in Ukraine. The repatriation team will also be kept in isolation for the same period. Officials said the quarantine facility and other details are still being finalized.
Residents fearful of potentially infected people in the town of Novi Sanzhary threw stones at the 45 Ukrainian and 27 foreign evacuees and clashed with police, according to local media reports. The stones smashed a window of the bus carrying the evacuees. It was not immediately clear whether anyone was injured. Videos posted on social media showed scores of police dragging protesters away. There are a total of 538 Filipino crew members on the cruise liner.
The incident appeared to have been sparked by the circulation of a fraudulent email that Ukrainian intelligence officials said originated outside the country. The email, which coincided with the arrival of Wuhan evacuees, purported to be from Ukraine’s Health Ministry and was sent to the ministry’s entire contact list. It falsely said there were five cases of coronavirus in the country. The global outbreak has affected the Philippines’ 2 million-strong overseas workforce, resulting in panic and job uncertainty. At least two Filipinos in Hong Kong and the United Arab Emirates have tested positive for the virus.
Just two Ukrainians have been infected — both were quarantined in Japan on the Diamond Princess cruise ship — and they have since recovered. HONG KONG — A 70-year-old man has died after testing positive for coronavirus, according to a Hong Kong hospital, bringing city’s death toll from the outbreak to two.
“Those events that took place yesterday, in my opinion, are the result of, among other things, the information war that is ongoing against our country, both from the inside and the outside,” Ukrainian Prime Minister Oleksiy Honcharuk said Friday in an address to parliament. A spokeswoman for Princess Margaret Hospital said the patient died on Wednesday morning after his condition deteriorated. When health officials initially provided details on his case on Friday, they said he had underlying illnesses. He was sent to the hospital on Feb. 12 after developing malaise, shortness of breath and cough, the Center for Health Protection said, where he was in critical condition at the time. The man, who lives alone, had visited mainland China for a day trip on Jan. 22.
“I suppose that the provocations will continue,” he added. “I think that the information field will continue to swing, to create a panic, to sow distrust and discord among us.” As of Wednesday morning, Hong Kong reported 62 cases of coronavirus infection, including the two deaths. The first death, a 39-year-old man who contracted the virus outside of the city, also had underlying medical issues, health officials said.
Angola has released 50 travelers who arrived from China, ending what may be one of the first quarantines in Africa meant to stop the possible spread of coronavirus.
The group of travelers held in the capital, Luanda, included 13 people from Angola, 36 from China and one from Brazil, according to the country’s official ANGOP news agency.
While there are no confirmed cases of coronavirus in Africa, global health officials have expressed concerns that some countries on the continent may be especially ill-equipped to handle the virus in the event of an outbreak.
The World Health Organization has identified 13 countries across the continent, including Angola, as “vulnerable” because of high volumes of travel or their direct links to China. About 10,000 Chinese firms operate in Africa, and the continent’s largest airline, Ethiopian Airlines, has continued its flights to China despite intense public pressure.
WHO has sent kits to 29 labs on the continent to equip them to handle the virus, the BBC reported, with the ultimate goal of ensuring that 36 African countries are prepared.
Outside of Angola, more than 100 people were quarantined earlier this month after arriving in Uganda. Botswana, Ethiopia, Ghana, Ivory Coast and Kenya have all also dealt with suspected cases, though only Egypt has confirmed a case so far.
TOKYO — Tokyo’s governor said Friday that her government would cancel or postpone many large-scale official events for the next three weeks to prevent the spread of the new coronavirus.
Gov. Yuriko Koike told a news conference that her government regards the period until March 15 as “an important period for the prevention of the spread of infection” and will “in principle” cancel or postpone events organized by the government that might pose risks to participants.
Some events, such as graduation ceremonies, will be allowed to go ahead provided they implement measures to prevent the virus from spreading. Outdoor events that do not serve meals will also be held after conducting risk assessments, she said.
The announcement came just 154 days before the opening of the Tokyo Olympics. Over the past week, Tokyo has reported 25 confirmed cases of covid-19, including several related to a party held by a taxi drivers’ union. The government has set up a special task force panel to discuss measures against the spread of virus.
Koike told reporters that in view of recent trends, she sees the next three weeks as a “crucial moment.”
BEIJING — Chinese researchers are reporting progress in developing a coronavirus vaccine.
The first vaccine is expected to be submitted for clinical trials around late April, Chinese vice minister of Science and Technology Xu Nanping told reporters on Friday. Animal models of mice and monkeys infected with the novel coronavirus have also been constructed, which will provide support for drug screening, vaccine development and research on viral transmission mechanism.
China set up a coronavirus scientific research group about one month ago, with 14 experts led by renowned pulmonologist Zhong Nanshan.
“One month is a very short time for scientific research, but a very long time for patients struggling with the disease. The scientific and technological community nationwide will put the safety of people’s lives and health first and spare no effort to continue to produce tangible and effective scientific research results,” Xu told reporters, adding that vaccine development in China was “synchronized” with that of teams in other countries.
Pharmaceutical firms including Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen unit and Sanofi Pasteur have been working with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on a vaccine.
BEIJING — Across China, governments are continuing to wrestle with the coronavirus — and the concept of transparency.
The health commission in Xiantao, west of Wuhan, issued a gag order on Tuesday warning employees not to speak to reporters or leak documents that would “incite online discourse and cause negative social impact.” It leaked anyway.
The document touched a nerve once it landed online: Chinese Internet users drew parallels with how police in late December silenced doctors in Wuhan who had shared documents proving the existence of a novel coronavirus. That delayed the government’s response to the epidemic during a crucial period and later became a national scandal.
“Do you know how Wuhan and Hubei’s epidemic became so severe in the first place? When these things happen, you only know one thing: suppression!” the top commenter on a Weibo thread said. Other commenters wondered if the Xiantao government was breaking the law by warning employees from speaking out.
On Wednesday, Xiantao officials backtracked. Asked to explain the document by reporters from Chongqing’s Shangyou Daily, they said the earlier directive was “inappropriate” and had been retracted.
National-level officials have expressed worry about the epidemic’s spread in less-developed parts of Hubei in places like Xiantao, which is about 90 minutes’ drive from Wuhan and has a population of over 1 million. As of Thursday night, Xiantao reported 568 confirmed cases, a relatively low number among Hubei cities.
Chinese citizens have fumed in recent weeks about the culture of secrecy and coverups that pervades their government. Some Internet users have compared Beijing’s approach to the ossified Soviet Union portrayed in last year’s television series Chernobyl, which has been a minor hit on Chinese streaming sites.
Wuhan’s original “whistleblower doctor,” Li Wenliang, contracted the disease and died Feb. 7, becoming a martyr in the eyes of many Chinese who were moved by his calls for freedom of speech. But in the wake of his death, online memorials and criticism of government censorship have been quickly suppressed.
The city of Moscow has placed 2,500 travelers who came from China under two-week quarantine orders, its mayor said, adding that officials will continue to apply such measures.
In a post on his personal blog, Mayor Sergey Sobyanin said that all airline passengers coming to Moscow from China, whether directly or through other countries, will also undergo tests for coronavirus. Anyone with a fever or other symptoms will be immediately hospitalized.
A temporary entry ban on all Chinese travelers took effect Thursday in Russia, but Sobyanin’s order also looks to address the possible spread of the virus among those who are already in the city. Any passengers who took one of 58 recent flights from China to Moscow are being instructed not to leave their homes or hotels for two weeks, he said.
To enforce the quarantine order, Sobyanin said that the Moscow government is conducting raids on homes and hotels and employing automated facial recognition systems and other technical measures.
On his blog, he described how this might work in practice: After erroneously testing positive for coronavirus, one Chinese citizen was caught on security cameras violating her quarantine by leaving her apartment to meet a neighbor.
In addition, the taxi driver for one recent arrival from China was tracked down using cameras at the Moscow airport, though she tested negative for coronavirus and quarantine was not required.
Elsewhere in Russia, the passengers of a train traveling from Kyiv, Ukraine, to Moscow were quarantined in the city of Bryansk, about halfway along that route, after a Chinese citizen on board was removed and taken to a hospital, according to Interfax news agency.
SEOUL — Russian diplomats in North Korea are kept in a “house arrest-like” quarantine in their embassy building and residential complex, Moscow’s top envoy to Pyongyang told the Russian news agency Tass.
Russia’s ambassador to North Korea Alexander Matsegora told the state-run Tass on Thursday that officials at the embassy are “going through difficult times” in a quarantine “not much different from house arrest.”
Matsegora said he and his colleagues cannot leave the diplomatic compound since all foreigners in the country have been put under strict quarantine until March 1. Even within the compound, no movement is allowed except for taking out trash and visiting a grocery store inside the grounds, according to Matsegora.
Embassy work is also disrupted as staff members have not had any meetings with North Korean officials nor diplomats from other countries, he said.
North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency said last week that mandatory quarantine period for all foreigners has been doubled from two weeks to a month under an “emergency” measure.
Since the coronavirus outbreak in neighboring China, North Korea has maintained that there is no evidence of the virus in the country. The World Health Organization, too, said on Tuesday that there is “no indication” of coronavirus outbreak in the isolated nation.
However, South Korean news outlets reported multiple cases of the virus in the North earlier this month, citing unnamed sources.
North Korean state media said on Friday that the country is making efforts to “prevent the coronavirus from ever entering.” It also described strict quarantines on people who recently returned from countries where coronavirus infection was reported.
North Korea has also cut cross-border air and train routes since the virus outbreak.
Authorities in three Chinese provinces on Friday announced viral outbreaks inside prisons that added roughly 500 cases to the cumulative case count and the stark prospect of contagion now spreading through the densely packed facilities.
In Hubei province at the heart of the epidemic, 230 cases were found at a women’s prison in Wuhan, while 41 more cases were reported in a nearby county. Shandong province announced that 10 percent of the 2,077 inmates and staff at Renchang prison were infected. Zhejiang province reported 34 infections were reported at a jail.
It’s not clear why the cases came to light in quick succession on Friday, or when the infections were first discovered. Various authorities appeared to disclose the outbreaks only after Shandong province announced the dismissal of its justice department’s Communist Party chief Friday and revealed the scale of infections at Renchang prison.
Within hours, several other provinces announced that they, too, had outbreaks inside penal facilities.
Wu Lei, head of Shandong Prison Administrative Bureau, told reporters Friday that two police officers were confirmed to have the coronavirus on Feb. 12 and 13 and the prison began “transferring prisoners to a single room” as a precautionary measure on Feb. 14. “We felt really guilty. It revealed the ineffectiveness of our preventive measures,” he said, according to Chinese media.
The Hubei health commission said in a statement Friday that because prisons were not linked to its centralized case reporting system, the provincial commission only updated their tallies after receiving reports from prisons “by hand” late Thursday.
The prison case counts appeared to further scramble the case data reported by the Chinese government. Hubei province revised its statistics on Friday to at least partially — but not fully — account for prison cases, but discrepancies in the arithmetic remained.
National officials have not publicly addressed how they would confront the problem.
Days before the announcements, speculation had surfaced on Chinese social media that prisons in Shandong and Zhejiang may be ravaged by the coronavirus but never officially confirmed.
After several days of widely fluctuating statistics, state-controlled media Friday began to circulate remarks by the secretary general of the Communist Party’s powerful political and legal commission, Chen Yixin, warning the entire bureaucracy to report accurate numbers and not “hide” cases.
“Behind the numbers lies the lives of the people and the credibility of the government,” Chen said.
North Korea has closed all of its schools as of Thursday in response to fears about the spreading coronavirus, the Daily NK reported.
The closure affects all of the country’s educational institutions, from child-care centers though secondary schools and most colleges, except for universities in Pyongyang, according to the Seoul-based news website.
Pyongyang university students who live in the capital have been told to stay at home, while those who come from other parts of the country have been ordered not to leave their dormitories, the Daily NK reported.
Although the coronavirus originated in neighboring China, which has since documented tens of thousands of cases, North Korea has insisted it is free of the virus. On Wednesday, officials with the World Health Organization said there are “no indications” of covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus.
The school closure has nonetheless sparked some fears that an outbreak is already underway in North Korea, according to the Daily NK, even as all foreign tourists have been blocked from entering the country.
BEIJING — Wuhan has dumped nearly 2,000 tons of disinfectant in the city’s drainage networks in a bid to prevent the coronavirus from spreading through the sewer system, which has been a growing concern with troubling historical precedent.
Since Jan. 29, Wuhan — the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak — has mobilized over 6,500 people to pour 1,936 tons of disinfectant down the drains, targeting pipelines, septic tanks and sewage wells in hospitals, centralized quarantine facilities and other “high risk” areas, the city’s water authority said on Thursday.
The move came after research showed the virus can survive in human feces and that the pathogen could be transmitted along the fecal-oral route, despite repeated assurances from the government in the early days that it is only transmitted through direct contact with virus-laden droplets from an infected person.
In 2003, over 300 residents in Hong Kong’s Amoy Gardens compound were infected with the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) virus due to the defective design of its sewer system.
Wuhan’s 26 water treatment plants and sewage pumping stations have taken similar measures in the past three weeks, having poured sodium hypochlorite into wastewater for extra disinfection and oxidation around the clock.
Renowned respiratory expert Zhong Nanshan, who was a leading medical adviser in China’s management of the coronavirus outbreak, on Tuesday had warned the public to keep their drainage pipes unblocked as the virus might spread through drainage systems.
“If a waste pipe is blocked, the contaminated air, or the aerosol carrying the novel coronavirus, may lead to infection,” Zhong said at a news conference in Guangzhou.
“I think the virus was spread and inhaled through aerosol that contained dried and contaminated feces, not taken in through the digestion tract,” Zhong added.
Two research teams, one led by Dr. Zhong, announced last week that they had isolated novel coronavirus strains from feces of infected patients.
Earlier this month, dozens of homes in Hong Kong’s Tsing Yi area were evacuated after two tenants from different floors of one building were infected. Authorities have yet to conclude whether the infections were caused by a modified drainage pipe, as suspected.
BEIJING — China is grieving the death of another young doctor in Wuhan, a 29-year old pulmonologist at Jiangxia District No. 1 People’s Hospital named Peng Yinhua.
Peng was scheduled to hold his wedding on Feb. 1 but postponed it to continue treating patients who began flooding into Wuhan’s hospitals in January as the coronavirus outbreak escalated. He had wedding invitation cards stored in his office desk, unsent, as he rushed back to work, according to Wuhan’s Changjiang Daily newspaper.
Peng Yinhua, a frontline doctor at Jiangxia First Hospital in virus epicenter #Wuhan, died of #COVID19 on Thursday night. He had earlier delayed his wedding as he wanted to treat patients with the disease at hospital. pic.twitter.com/zEQaUMAnJV
Peng worked practically nonstop for weeks, telling his colleagues that he did not need rest because he was young, before falling ill and admitting himself into his hospital Jan. 25.
Despite several weeks of treatment at Wuhan’s advanced Jinyintuan hospital and a successful blood transfusion, he died Thursday, becoming the latest high-profile case of a young, seemingly healthy adult succumbing to Covid-19.
China’s battle against the epidemic has been particularly costly for medical professions. More than 1,700 health workers have ben infected so far, with at least seven deaths, including Peng.
On Tuesday, Wuhan doctors and nurses stood at attention outside Wuhan’s Wuchang hospital to mourn the passing of hospital director Liu Zhiming’s hearse. Liu became infected on the job and died age 51, the Wuhan Health Commission said.
YOKOHAMA, Japan — As hundreds of passengers disembark from the Diamond Princess on Friday, the Japanese government insists that the quarantine was effective in reducing transmission of the virus on the ship.
It also says its choices were limited at the start, because it lacked facilities on land to isolate all 3,711 people on board.
Still, with at least 634 people on board confirmed to have contracted the virus, many questions remain unanswered. Here are a few of them.
After the first case was diagnosed, why did it take more than three days before the passengers were placed in quarantine?
A former passenger from Hong Kong was diagnosed with the virus on Feb 1. Princess Cruises said it learned about this on social media the following day and reached out to Hong Kong authorities. On Feb. 3, after receiving formal notification from Hong Kong, the captain told passengers the ship would wait in Yokohama for Japanese health ministry officials to assess the situation.
But passengers continued to mingle, including at a buffet dinner on Feb. 4. It was only later that the captain told passengers to remain in their cabins. Those three days provided a crucial window for the virus to spread.
Was it ethical to leave more than 1,000 crew members on board to run the ship, with no effective quarantine or isolation, and no choice in the matter?
Indian crew members appealed to their government to get them off the ship, saying they feared for their lives. But their calls went unanswered. In the end at least 74 crew members contracted the virus, with many falling sick after the quarantine was imposed.
Was it right to confine more than 200 people over the age of 80 on board?
Eight days into the quarantine, Japan’s government changed course and began to bring the oldest passengers off the ship, but many people believe it should have acted sooner.
Why did it take a week to bring one 84-year-old woman off the ship after she came down with fever, and did this delay contribute to her death?
Asked about this case, Japan’s government spokesman Yoshihide Suga said only that doctors gave “the highest priority” to people with a fever or over 80 years old.
Did the ship act as a breeding ground for the virus?
The U.S. government seems to think so, mandating an additional two weeks’ quarantine for its evacuated citizens. The Japanese government says the quarantine was effective “in reducing the transmission” of the virus, with most of the infections after Feb. 5 occurring among crew members and within cabins.
Were the conditions safe for people brought in to manage the quarantine?
Infectious disease expert Kentaro Iwata called the conditions on board chaotic and scary, with no effective infection control. The government has pushed back against the criticisms, yet six workers — four government officials, one medic and one ambulance driver — all contracted the virus.
SEOUL — South Korea designated a southern city and surrounding area a “special care zone” after a surge in coronavirus cases centered on a church there.
Prime Minister Chung Sye-kyun said early Friday that South Korea faces a coronavirus “emergency” and vowed to mobilize “utmost resources” to Daegu city and surrounding North Gyeongsang province, where more than two-thirds of the country’s 156 virus cases have occurred.
President Moon Jae-in on Friday described South Korea’s coronavirus situation as “grave” and ordered inspections of the Daegu church and a nearby hospital identified as two clusters of infection. More than 80 coronavirus patients are linked to the local branch of Shincheonji Church of Jesus, a fringe religious sect. The hospital in nearby Cheongdo County reported 16 infection cases, including the country’s first death from the virus.
Three members of South Korea’s military also tested positive for the virus since Thursday. Defense Minister Jeong Kyeong-doo said all soldiers will be banned from leaving their barracks except for special situations.
After several cases were reported in capital, Seoul, since Thursday, mayor Park Won-soon said large demonstrations often held in the city on weekends will be banned.
Meanwhile, Daegu Mayor Kwon Young-jin said Friday the city’s 2.5 million residents should “refrain from movement.” Daegu officials ordered schools and nurseries to postpone classes by a week to prevent the virus from spreading.
“Concerns of local transmission are growing with the jump in confirmed cases in Daegu and North Gyeongsang,” Moon said, while urging the public to “trust the government’s efforts.”
TORONTO — A woman who recently returned to Canada after a trip to Iran has tested positive for the novel coronavirus, public health officials said Thursday, bringing the total number of cases in the country to nine.
The woman, who is in her 30s, lives in British Columbia and has a “relatively mild” form of the virus, said Bonnie Henry, the provincial health officer. She and some of her close contacts are in self-isolation at home.
The case, which Henry described as “unusual,” is prompting new questions about how the coronavirus may be spreading.
“This could be an indicator that there’s more widespread transmission,” Henry said. “This is what we call an indicator, or a sentinel event.”
Iran has reported five cases of the novel coronavirus and two deaths.
Henry said that public health officials are investigating the details of the woman’s travel and when exactly she began to experience symptoms, to determine whether the other passengers on her flight need to be notified.
There have been six cases of the novel coronavirus in British Columbia and three cases in Ontario.