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New developments suggest coronavirus incubation could be longer than 14 days, as global infections rise South Korea coronavirus cases surge as Italy confirms first death from the virus
(about 20 hours later)
There are some indications that the incubation period for the coronavirus could be longer than 14 days, with patients testing positive after much longer quarantine periods, researchers said. The rush to understand the virus came as infections rose in South Korea, Japan, Iran and Italy. The head of the World Health Organization warned that the window for stopping the epidemic was narrowing. Here’s what we know: 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.
● Chinese leader Xi Jinping has been advised that the situation in Wuhan “remains grim and complex.” Amid an alarming surge in cases with no clear link to China, infectious disease experts say they believe the flu-like illness may soon be a pandemic and impossible to contain. 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.
● South Korea and Japan both reported a sharp spike in cases, with the number of cases in South Korea rising to at least 556. A sixth person died in Iran from the virus, while Italy has at least 76 confirmed cases, making it the largest hot spot in Europe. 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.
● Nine South Korean tourists who recently toured Israel and the occupied West Bank tested positive for coronavirus Saturday. Israeli and Palestinian authorities are urging anyone who may have come in contact with them to report and self-isolate. 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.
● China on Sunday local time reported 648 new cases and 97 additional deaths. There continues to be a great deal of skepticism about China’s numbers as the criteria for diagnosing coronavirus keep changing. Here are the latest developments:
● Thousands of Russian-linked social-media accounts are leading a disinformation campaign to cause alarm about the outbreak, the AFP reported. ●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 — Scientists were studying a case in China that suggested the incubation period for coronavirus could be longer than 14 days, potentially casting doubt on current quarantine criteria even as the epidemic moved into new regions. ● 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.
The potential for a longer incubation period was linked to a patient in China’s Hubei Province, where the virus was first detected in December. A 70-year-old man was infected with coronavirus, but did not show symptoms until 27 days later, the local government reported. ● 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.
South Korea and Japan both reported a sharp spike in cases Saturday, while an additional 97 people died of the virus in China, and a sixth person died in Iran. Italian authorities Saturday said the country was seeing a sudden rise in coronavirus cases, with at least 58 confirmed in the past two days — an outbreak that represents the largest across Europe. ● Beijing braced for a potential explosion of infection numbers in the capital after two hospitals were put under quarantine.
Meanwhile, scientists in China reported indications that the virus might be transmissible through urine. ● 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.”
Almost 78,000 people worldwide have been diagnosed with the coronavirus, with the vast majority of cases located in mainland China, according to the World Health Organization. Roughly 1,400 cases have been tallied outside China. 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.
WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Saturday that WHO experts were due to arrive that day in Wuhan, China, the center of the coronavirus outbreak. The team has visited three Chinese provinces this week, Tedros said in a speech in Geneva. 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.
Outside China, Tedros said that the WHO is concerned about the number of cases without a clear epidemiological link, such as recent travel to China or contact with a person known to be infected. SEOUL — South Korea reported 142 additional cases of the coronavirus, Korea’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Saturday.
The organization also has been sending medical supplies to Africa and training the continent’s health-care workers to prepare them for the virus’s possible arrival there, Tedros said. The only confirmed case of the coronavirus in Africa is in Egypt. 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.
“Our biggest concern continues to be the potential for covid-19 to spread in countries with weaker health systems,” Tedros said. South Korean government has designated Daegu and North Gyeongsang as “special care zones” to which support will be concentrated.
South Korea coronavirus cases surge as Italy confirms first death from the virus The latest cases have brought up the national tally of the virus to 346, an 11-fold jump from the beginning of the week.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping, who has not visited Wuhan since the outbreak began, was briefed that the situation in the city and in surrounding Hubei province “remains grim and complex,” according to a report by the official Xinhua News Agency published Saturday. “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 nationwide inflection point of the epidemic has not yet arrived,” the report said after a meeting of Communist Party leaders. 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.
China’s National Health Commission reported Sunday local time that 648 new cases of coronavirus were diagnosed Saturday, taking the total to nearly 77,000. The rate of infection outside Hubei appears to have slowed markedly, although there has been a great deal of confusion about the statistics this week as officials have repeatedly changed the criteria for confirming cases. The spike in coronavirus cases have spurred panicked school closures and border restrictions aimed at curbing Covid-19’s spread.
Authorities discovered Friday that a 70-year-old man in Hubei was confirmed as infected after 27 days in isolation, while a man in Jiangxi province tested positive after 14 days of centralized quarantine and five days of isolation at home. On Thursday, authorities reported that a man in Hubei had tested positive for coronavirus after what appeared to be a 38-day incubation period with no symptoms. 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.
The United States is also struggling with domestic fallout from its responses to the virus. The Californian city of Costa Mesta has sued the federal government over its plan to transfer quarantined coronavirus patients from the Travis Air Force Base near Sacramento to the former Fairview Developmental Center as early as this weekend. The city said that the area in question is surrounded by residential neighborhoods and that placing patients with a highly contagious disease so close by could pose a risk to public health. 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.
A federal judge granted Costa Mesa’s request Friday, temporarily blocking the transfer of up to 50 patients. The restraining order prohibits state and federal government authorities from transporting anyone infected with coronavirus or who has been exposed to the disease to Costa Mesa before a hearing at 2 p.m. Monday at the Santa Ana federal courthouse, according to the Los Angeles Times. Iran is holding nationwide parliamentary elections Friday.
The State Department, meanwhile, is battling thousands of Russian-linked social-media accounts promoting baseless theories that the United States created the coronavirus outbreak, according to the AFP. The accounts post “almost near identical” messages at similar times in five languages, the report says. 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.
U.S. officials said they discovered the disinformation campaign in mid-January. 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.
“Russia’s intent is to sow discord and undermine U.S. institutions and alliances from within, including through covert and coercive malign influence campaigns,” Philip Reeker, the acting assistant secretary of state for Europe and Eurasia, told the AFP. 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.
Misinformation about the coronavirus outbreak has proliferated — mostly on social media — since the first cases were reported in December. 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.
The State Department on Saturday heightened its travel advisories from Level 1 to Level 2 for South Korea and Japan, urging Americans to “exercise increased caution” when traveling to those countries due to the rising number of coronavirus cases there. Older adults and people with chronic conditions, who might be at higher risk of contracting the virus, should consider postponing unnecessary travel to those countries, the department said. 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 Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC) reported Sunday that 123 additional cases of the coronavirus had been detected, taking the total to 556. This makes it the worst-affected country outside China. 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.
“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 said. The announcement comes after Australian health authorities on Friday announced four people from the Diamond Princess has contracted the virus.
Nearly two-thirds of the new cases have been traced to existing clusters at a church in the southern city of Daegu and a hospital in nearby Cheongdo County, according to the KCDC. “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.
More than half of South Korea’s cases are connected to the Daegu branch of the Shincheonji Church of Jesus the Temple of the Tabernacle of the Testimony. 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.
Since members of the church attended a funeral at nearby Cheongdo Daenam hospital, at least 111 coronavirus cases have been reported there, including two patients who died of the virus. 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.
The mass infection at the hospital is centered on its locked psychiatric ward, where a confined environment could have aggravated transmissions, said Jung Eun-Kyeong, director of the KCDC. 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.
A 57-year-old patient at Daenam hospital died of the coronavirus, state-affiliated Yonhap News Agency reported early Sunday local time. The man is the fourth person to die of the virus in South Korea, according to Yonhap’s report, which The Washington Post could not immediately verify independently. 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.
Trump was not told coronavirus-infected Americans would be flown home from cruise ship 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.
In Japan, the number of coronavirus cases rose to 121 on Saturday, more than tripling in a week. That number excludes the 634 people on board the Diamond Princess who contracted the virus. 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.
One of the latest cases was a teacher in her 60s at a public junior high school east of Tokyo, who complained of nausea while working. The mayor of Chiba city said the school will be closed until Wednesday, public broadcaster NHK reported. “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.”
The teacher had not traveled abroad in the past two weeks and has no record of having been in contact with a known infected person, underlining the fact that the virus is now spreading almost invisibly throughout the country, experts say. 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.
As numbers suddenly rose in Italy, the government has scrambled to contain the new outbreak, asking some 50,000 people to stay indoors and suspending all public events — including religious ceremonies and school — in 10 small towns to the south of Milan. Read more here.
Until a few days ago, Italy had seen only three confirmed infections, including a pair of Chinese tourists. 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.
“There is quite an evident contagion, a very strong one,” said Giulio Gallera, health chief of the northern Lombardy region, which has seen the majority of the cases. 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.
Italian officials Friday attributed the country’s first death to the coronavirus, and Saturday said that a 77-year-old woman had also tested positive for the virus after being found dead in her home. But Italian authorities said the woman suffered from other health conditions, and were unsure if it was the virus that had killed her. 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.
The cases in Italy appeared concentrated in the prosperous Lombardy region, which includes the country’s financial hub, Milan, and other areas nearby. 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.
According to Italian media reports, one of the first people to come down with the virus was a 38-year-old who’d had dinner with somebody who had just come back from China. But some three weeks passed between that dinner and the time the man came down with a fever. In between, he ran a half-marathon, played soccer and traveled to several towns, according to La Repubblica, a major Italian daily. 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.
Meanwhile, the number of confirmed cases of the virus in Iran has risen to 29. 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 outbreak there has been centered on the holy Shiite city of Qom, where on Wednesday authorities suspended schools and religious gatherings as a precaution. On Saturday, Iranian authorities also closed schools in the capital, Tehran, and issued a temporary ban on cinemas and art-related events across the country, state-run Fars News Agency reported. 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.
Other countries in the region have also reacted with alarm, particularly after Lebanon’s first coronavirus case Friday was found to be a woman who had just traveled from Qom. 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.
In the past few days, Iraq and Kuwait suspended direct flights to Iran, while Iraq temporarily halted new visas for Iranian nationals and, along with Turkey, imposed restrictions on travelers who had recently arrived from Iran. Kuwait Airways said Saturday that it would be chartering special flights to evacuate citizens from Mashhad, Iran. No details about the fourth patient were reported.
As fears mounted, Israel announced Saturday that nine South Koreans who had recently returned home from a tour in Israel tested positive for the virus. Israeli and Palestinian authorities on Saturday urged anyone who may have interacted with the group visiting from Feb. 8 to 15 to self-quarantine as they work to trace who may have had contact with the tourists, who visited major cities including Jerusalem. Brendan Murphy, Australia’s chief medical officer, told the outlet that the new diagnoses aren’t abnormal.
Israel’s ambassador to China, Zvi Heifetz, was among those who self-quarantined, the Jerusalem Post reported, citing Israel’s foreign ministry. Heifetz took the same flight to Seoul as the South Korean tourists and is quarantined in Beijing, the report says. “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.
Roughly 200 students and teachers who came into contact with the South Koreans have also self-quarantined, according to the Times of Israel. 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.
A spokeswoman for Israel’s Population and Immigration Authority said Saturday that all non-Israeli citizens arriving on a direct flight from Seoul to Tel Aviv that evening would be denied entry. Israel’s Health Ministry has ordered Israelis returning from South Korea to self-quarantine. At least 46 Australians aboard the cruise ship were infected with the coronavirus, the outlet reported.
Meanwhile, tests are continuing on the crew members on board the Diamond Princess. At least 74 crew members have so far been found to have the virus. 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.
All of the passengers have now been tested and almost all have left the ship, either to go home if they tested negative, to local hospitals or government facilities if they have the virus, or back to their home countries. The patient recuperated in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, and entered a recommended quarantine period at home, according to Reuters.
Some passengers were asked to stay on board to serve an additional quarantine if their cabin mate contracted the virus, but they are also disembarking Saturday to serve out the rest of their quarantine in a government facility, local media reported. The city’s public health clinical center told the news organizations that similar cases have been reported in other regions of the country.
In China’s ‘war’ on coronavirus, hospitals turn away other patients — with dire results 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.
More than 200 port calls in Japan by international cruise ships have been canceled since the beginning of February due to the coronavirus outbreak, a Kyodo News survey showed Saturday, with the lost revenue from passengers coming ashore dealing another blow to Japan’s weak economy. In similar coronaviruses, 14 days is the longest incubation period that has been observed.
The 83-year-old woman who tested positive for the coronavirus when she arrived at Kuala Lumpur airport after disembarking in Cambodia from the MS Westerdam cruise ship has recovered, Malaysia health authorities said Saturday. At a daily media briefing Friday, WHO officials were asked repeatedly whether the coronavirus outbreak was likely to become a pandemic.
The woman “is showing good improvement and signs of recovery, however, she is still being monitored and managed in hospital for a slight cough,” Malaysia’s director general of health, Noor Hisham Abdullah, said in a statement. In their responses, they seemed to take pains to avoid the p-word as much as possible.
The woman repeatedly tested negative while on board the ship and when she disembarked in Sihanoukville, then twice tested positive while transiting in Kuala Lumpur airport on Feb. 15. That set off a global scramble to track the hundreds of other passengers who had also disembarked then boarded planes bound for home. 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.
The woman was taken to a hospital and given antiviral treatment and supplementary oxygen, and she showed improvement after 72 hours of treatment initiation, Abdullah said. Two more tests, conducted 24 hours apart, both came back negative for coronavirus. For now, most new coronavirus cases are still tied to China.
But the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention cast doubt on whether the woman was ever infected, saying she “never had coronavirus to our knowledge.” 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.
Cambodia’s Ministry of Health had previously cleared the 747 crew members who were still on board the Westerdam and the 781 passengers who were still in the country of coronavirus infection. “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.”
Separately, scientists in China are continuing to study how the virus is transmitted. The pandemic designation is not one that WHO officials will make lightly. That’s because it comes with massive political and economic consequences.
A research team led by renowned Chinese pulmonologist Zhong Nanshan had isolated live coronavirus strains in urine samples from infected patients, Zhao Jincun, a respiratory expert at the State Key Laboratory, told reporters in Guangdong on Saturday. 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.
The team of scientists had previously said the virus, in addition to being carried in respiratory droplets, appeared to be transmissible through fecal matter, underscoring the need to practice good hand washing as a preventive measure. 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.
Zhao did not directly say that the virus could be transmitted through urine, simply noting that the strains had been isolated and that this had implications for public health control. They are continuing to work on isolating the virus and on a cure, the Guangzhou Daily reported. 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.”
But he said people should pay more attention to personal and family hygiene to prevent the spread of the virus and recommended frequently washing hands, closing the toilet lid before flushing and making sure bathroom drains are not blocked. 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.
Denyer reported from Tokyo, Chico Harlan from Rome, and Miriam Berger and Marisa Iati from Washington. Lyric Li in Beijing, Akiko Kashiwagi in Tokyo, Min Joo Kim in Seoul, Stefano Pitrelli in Rome, Ruth Eglash in Jerusalem, and Yasmeen Abutaleb and Carol Morello in Washington contributed reporting. 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.
Two Beijing hospitals quarantined amid fears coronavirus infections will spike in the capital 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.
Confusion mounts over China’s counting methods as coronavirus numbers swing wildly 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.
Coronavirus claims lives of two passengers from Diamond Princess cruise ship, Japanese media says 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.
Today’s coverage from Post correspondents around the world 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.
Like Washington Post World on Facebook and stay updated on foreign news “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?”
Read more: In China’s ‘war’ on coronavirus, hospitals turn away other patients — with dire results.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Of the 256 Canadians aboard the Diamond Princess, 47 tested positive for the virus and are being treated in hospitals in Japan.
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.”
“Everyone we have seen since we landed has welcomed us home,” she wrote. “It made my eyes all weepy.”
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Because of that, Tedros said he would be meeting with African health ministers on Saturday to talk about their preparation efforts.
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.”
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.
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.
Even the Global Times, a nationalist newspaper affiliated with the ruling Communist Party, described the increase in cases in Beijing this week as “whopping.”
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 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.
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.
Read more here: Two Beijing hospitals quarantined amid fears coronavirus infections will spike in the capital
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.
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.
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.
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.
KCDC Director Jung Eun-kyeong told reporters that Shincheonji services, which often gather followers in a crowded spaces, possibly led to mass transmissions.
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.
Read more here: South Korean coronavirus spike linked to doomsday sect with messianic leader
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Olympics will run from July 24 to Aug. 9, with the Paralympics scheduled to take place from Aug. 25 to Sept. 6.
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.
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.
A factory that will be converted to a hospital will have the largest number of beds among the other temporary hospitals, the paper reported.
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.
A total of 13,348 beds are still open at these makeshift hospitals to receive coronavirus patients, according to China’s Global Times.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.”
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.
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.”
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.
The United Arab Emirates announced two new cases of coronavirus Friday, in addition to nine that had been identified in the past few weeks.
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.
The ministry said the two new patients, one from the Philippines and one from Bangladesh, are both in stable condition.
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 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.
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.
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.
“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.”
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.
Read more: Dow drops 300 points as evidence of coronavirus fallout continues to emerge
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.
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.
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.
During the height of the Ebola epidemic, the 2015 Pyongyang marathon was closed and later reopened to foreigners, Reuters reported at the time.
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.
Otto Warmbier, a U.S. college student, had entered the country on a Young Pioneer Tours trip before his arrest and death.
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 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.
The Diamond Princess, carrying more than 3,700 passengers and crew members, has provided one of the most dramatic plotlines in the coronavirus saga.
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.
That total includes four Britons, but Saturday’s repatriation flight will carry only those who have tested negative.
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.
Nine people in Britain have tested positive for coronavirus so far.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
“We won’t leave you there,” Zelensky says to Zinchenko in the video, adding that he only recently heard of her situation.
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.
“I wanted to call you personally because I find it very important,” Zelensky told Zinchenko. “We will surely find means and ways.”
SEOUL — South Korea on Friday reported its second death from the new coronavirus, according to the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC).
The woman in her 50s died after being diagnosed with the virus at Daenam hospital in Cheongdo, in the southern North Gyeongsang province.
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 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.
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.
The KCDC is investigating the hospital’s link to a bigger cluster of coronavirus infections at a church in the nearby city of Daegu.
More than two-thirds of South Korea’s 204 coronavirus cases are traced to the Daegu church, according to the KCDC.
Iran raised its coronavirus count Friday, reporting two deaths among overall 13 new confirmed cases, the state-run Mehr News Agency reported.
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.
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.
Kianoush Jahanpur, a Health Ministry spokesman, said the latest cases all involved people either from Qom or who had recently visited there, Mehr reported.
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.
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.
Officials stressed that the patient did not contract the virus in Israel.
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.
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.
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.
Thailand has asked Israel to reconsider including it on the ban, which affects about 25,000 Thai workers employed largely in agriculture in Israel.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
After initially reporting three cases, Italian officials raised the count Friday to six.
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.
As of Tuesday, about 40 cases of the novel coronavirus had been confirmed elsewhere in Europe.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
That left many Americans behind in Japan searching for answers.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Just two Ukrainians have been infected — both were quarantined in Japan on the Diamond Princess cruise ship — and they have since recovered.
“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.
“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.”
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.