Here’s what you need to know:
The new coronavirus has killed more people than SARS did.
The coronavirus death toll in China has risen to 811, surpassing the toll from the SARS epidemic of 2002-3, according to official data released on Sunday.
The number of confirmed infections rose to 37,198, according to China’s National Health Commission. Eighty-nine deaths and 2,656 new cases were recorded in the preceding 24 hours, most of them in Hubei Province, the heart of the outbreak. A United States citizen died from the coronavirus in Wuhan, the provincial capital of Hubei, American officials said on Saturday.
The SARS epidemic, which also began in China, killed 774 people worldwide. There have been only two confirmed deaths from the new coronavirus outside mainland China — one in Hong Kong and one in the Philippines.
Many doctors believe that deaths and infections from the current epidemic in China are undercounted because testing facilities at hospitals and laboratories are under severe strain.
The number of new cases confirmed in the country has stabilized in recent days, but World Health Organization officials cautioned against reading too much into those numbers, saying that Wuhan and Hubei were still in the midst of a “very intense outbreak.”
“It’s very, very early to make any predictions,” said Dr. Michael Ryan, executive director of the W.H.O.’s health emergencies program. “This is still a very, very intense outbreak in Wuhan and Hubei.”
The measures put in place in Hubei appear to be “paying off,” said Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the W.H.O.’s director general, but he warned that the course of outbreaks like these is unpredictable. “We have to understand it with caution because it can show stability for a few days and then they can shoot up,” he said. “I’ve said it many times, it’s slow now but it may accelerate.”
Xi stays out of the spotlight, but he might not escape blame.
For China’s leader, Xi Jinping, the outbreak is not just a health crisis, but a political one: a test of the authoritarian system he has built around himself. As his government struggles to contain the virus amid rising public discontent with its performance, the changes that Mr. Xi has ushered in could make it difficult for him to escape blame.
“It’s a big shock to the legitimacy of the ruling party. I think it could be only second to the June 4 incident of 1989. It’s that big,” said Rong Jian, a writer about politics in Beijing, referring to the armed crackdown on Tiananmen Square protesters that year.
“There’s no doubt about his control over power,” he added, “but the manner of control and its consequences have hurt his legitimacy and reputation.”
Mr. Xi himself has recognized what is at stake, calling the outbreak “a major test of China’s system and capacity for governance.”
Yet as China’s battle with the coronavirus intensified, Mr. Xi put the country’s No. 2 leader, Li Keqiang, in charge of a leadership group handling the emergency, effectively turning him into the public face of the government’s response. It was Mr. Li who traveled to Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak, to visit doctors.
That was not without precedent, though it stood out in this crisis, after previous Chinese leaders had used times of disaster to try to show a more common touch. State television and newspapers almost always lead with fawning coverage of Mr. Xi’s every move.
Mr. Xi’s retreat from the spotlight, some analysts said, signaled an effort to insulate himself from a campaign that may falter and draw public ire. Yet Mr. Xi has consolidated power, sidelining or eliminating rivals, so there are few people left to blame when something goes wrong.
The illness gets a name, for now.
The Chinese government has announced a temporary name for the illness caused by the coronavirus, ordering the local authorities and the state news media to adopt it. In English, it will be called N.C.P., for novel coronavirus pneumonia, the national health commission said on Saturday.
A final, official name will eventually be chosen by the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses. The organization has submitted a name to a scientific journal for publication and hopes to reveal it within days, the BBC reported.
The naming of viral illnesses is a complicated matter that involves both science and public relations. Past names, like the Spanish flu or Rift Valley fever, have been seen as contributing to the stigmatization of countries or regions. In 2015, the World Health Organization issued new guidelines, after the choice of the name for Middle East respiratory syndrome, or MERS, was criticized.
As well as avoiding place names, those guidelines recommend not using people’s names (Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, Chagas disease), animal names (swine flu, equine encephalitis), cultural or occupational references (Legionnaires’ disease) or words that induce fear (unknown, death, fatal, epidemic).
The W.H.O. has recommended its own temporary name for the new illness: 2019-nCoV acute respiratory disease, or 2019-nCoV. But the name is difficult to pronounce, and has been less popular than “coronavirus,” which describes a larger category of viruses.
“We thought it was very important to put out an interim name so that no location was associated with the name,” Maria Van Kerkhove, a W.H.O. epidemiologist, told the body’s executive board on Friday.
2020-02-09 05:28:00Z
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