Coronavirus Live Updates: Xi Urges Tougher Response to the Crisis - The New York Times

Here are the highlights:

China’s leader, Xi Jinping, at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing last month. — Credit...Pool photo by Mark Schiefelbein

Xi Jinping signals more aggressive response to epidemic.

Convening a second special meeting of the Communist Party’s top political body on Monday, China’s leader, Xi Jinping, signaled a more assertive strategy for dealing with the coronavirus epidemic after days of seeming to retreat from center stage.

The meeting was only the second public appearance by the Chinese leader since the local government in Wuhan, the city at the epicenter of the outbreak, took the extraordinary step of locking down the city on Jan. 23, an order that almost certainly was approved at the highest levels in Beijing.

Mr. Xi dispatched the country’s No. 2 leader, Premier Li Keqiang, to Wuhan more than a week ago, when the death toll stood at 106. By Tuesday, the toll in China was more than 420 deaths, and the government reported 20,438 confirmed cases — roughly 15,000 more that during the SARS outbreak, according to the World Health Organization.

Mr. Xi, presiding over a meeting of the Politburo Standing Committee, said the crisis was “a major test of China’s system and capacity for governance,” according to state-run media reports, which did not offer specifics of his proposals. His comments underlined the scale of the crisis and represented at least an implicit acknowledgment that the system has fallen short in some areas.

Mr. Xi warned officials not to resist orders or to allow “bureaucratism and the practice of formalities for formalities’ sake” slow government efforts to bring the outbreak under control. “Those who disobey the unified command or shirk off responsibilities will be punished,” Mr. Xi said, the Xinhua news agency reported. Only a handful of local officials have been relieved of their duties so far, but more are expected to fall.

The Politburo Standing Committee, which includes Mr. Xi and the six other most powerful party officials, also indicated that possible changes in national policy were under consideration. Xinhua reported that the committee called for an overhaul of environmental sanitation standards and for a crackdown on the trade in wildlife, which has been identified as the probable source of the outbreak in a wholesale market in Wuhan.

Hong Kong’s first death comes amid calls for border shutdown.

A 39-year-old man in Hong Kong died Tuesday from the new coronavirus, the city’s Hospital Authority said.

The death from the outbreak was the first in Hong Kong, a semiautonomous Chinese territory, and the second outside mainland China. A man in the Philippines who was from Wuhan also died from the coronavirus, Philippine officials said Sunday.

The man who died Tuesday had traveled by train to Wuhan on Jan. 21 and had returned to Hong Kong two days later, the Hong Kong government said in a statement.

The case raised further alarm for the possibility that the disease was transmitted within the man’s household: His mother, who did not travel to Wuhan, later contracted the virus. The man’s wife and two children and a domestic helper who worked for him are being quarantined.

Coronavirus Map: Tracking the Spread of the Outbreak

The virus has sickened more than 20,600 people in China and 23 other countries.

Though Hong Kong shares a landmass with mainland China, the territory has not been hit nearly as hard by the outbreak, with just 17 confirmed cases. A neighboring city just across the border, Shenzhen, has had hundreds of cases.

The Hong Kong government has been under pressure to close its borders to mainland China. All but three border checkpoints out of 16 were shut on Monday, but the remaining entry points can still admit thousands of mainland Chinese visitors per day.

More than 2,500 medical workers went on strike Monday to demand a fully closed border. They said they were unsatisfied by the partial closings, and many continued to strike on Tuesday.

Macau to close all casinos for two weeks.

Macau’s top official said on Tuesday that the government would shut down the city’s lucrative casinos for half a month to combat the coronavirus outbreak, a drastic move that will further weaken the Chinese territory’s already ailing economy.

The semiautonomous enclave, which neighbors Hong Kong and is the world’s largest gambling hub, has reported 10 confirmed cases of the coronavirus, with a worker in the gambling industry among those infected. The shutdown was announced on Tuesday by Ho Iat Seng, the chief executive.

“Of course this was a difficult decision, but we must do it, for the health of Macau’s residents — this is our only goal,” Mr. Ho said. “Macau can still bear these economic losses right now.”

Macau’s casinos have struggled as the coronavirus outbreak led to growing travel restrictions for visitors from the mainland. Macau, the only place in China where casino gambling is legal, derives a significant portion of its revenue from gamblers from the mainland.

Mr. Ho also said the city’s basic public services — except for emergency ones — would be suspended, and he urged Macau residents to “not go outside” except to get food. “This is not a holiday,” he said.

How Bad Will the Coronavirus Outbreak Get? Here Are 6 Key Factors

Here’s what early research says about how the pathogen behaves and the factors that will determine whether it can be contained.

Looking for the basics? Start here.

What is a coronavirus, and how dangerous is it? Read up on the basics, including its symptoms and how it is transmitted.

Where has the virus spread? You can track its movement with this map.

How is the United States being affected? There were 11 confirmed cases as of Monday. American citizens and permanent residents who fly to the United States from China are now subject to a two-week quarantine.

Do masks work? The debate flares up.

Taiwan’s Centers for Disease Control said last week that healthy people did not need to wear surgical masks unless they were visiting a hospital. Hong Kong’s chief executive, Carrie Lam, instructed government officials on Tuesday to stop wearing the masks to help save supplies for medical workers.

The answer to the simplest of questions — do they work? — is, unfortunately, not that simple. There isn’t much high-quality scientific evidence on whether masks are an effective safeguard outside health care settings, where experts generally agree that they reduce risks. But it appears that while they can slow the spread of disease when worn by sick people, the masks — of which there is now a global shortage — do little when worn by healthy people.

Still, in some Asian cities like Hong Kong, where long lines form each morning for limited mask supplies, the vast majority of people on sidewalks and public transportation wear one, and people who don’t are sometimes questioned about it.

The masks can prevent large respiratory droplets from other people’s sneezes and coughs from entering your mouth and nose, but gaps around the mouth can still let unfiltered air in. What’s more, people often misuse the masks, or move them aside.

There’s no need for Americans to run out and stock up, though some have already begun to hoard them. A shortage of masks could raise the risk of the virus spreading if health care workers are unable to get the supplies they need.

Most experts agree: If you want to prevent the spread of the coronavirus and keep yourself safe, the best thing you can do is wash your hands and avoid touching your face.

They are from Wuhan, and they are China’s new pariahs.

One person was turned away by hotel after hotel after he showed his ID card. Another was expelled by fearful local villagers. A third found his most sensitive personal information leaked online after registering with the authorities.

These outcasts are from Wuhan, the capital of Hubei Province, epicenter of the rapidly spreading coronavirus outbreak. They are pariahs in China, among the millions unable to go home and feared as potential carriers of the mysterious virus.

All across the country, despite China’s vast surveillance network with its facial recognition systems and high-end cameras that is increasingly used to track its 1.4 billion people, the government has turned to familiar authoritarian techniques — like setting up dragnets and asking neighbors to inform on one another — as it tries to contain the outbreak.

It took the authorities about five days to contact Harmo Tang, a college student studying in Wuhan, after he returned to his hometown, Linhai, in eastern Zhejiang Province.

Mr. Tang says he was already under self-imposed isolation when local officials asked for his personal information, including name, address, phone number, identity card number and the date he returned from Wuhan.

Local officials returned a few days later to fasten police tape to his door and hang a sign that warned neighbors that a Wuhan returnee lived there. The sign included a hotline to call if anyone saw him or his family leave the apartment.

Mr. Tang said he received about four calls a day from different local government departments.

“In reality there’s not much empathy,” he said. “It’s not a caring tone they’re using. It’s a warning tone. I don’t feel very comfortable about it.”

Other victims of the lockdown: pets left alone in homes.

With Wuhan in lockdown, volunteers are trying to reach thousands of pets trapped alone in homes and at risk of starvation. Many pet owners who traveled out of the city during the Lunar New Year holiday period left only a few days’ supply of food and water, and they have taken to social media to plead for help in checking on their animals.

Hundreds of people, worried about their cats, dogs, pigs and snakes, have joined chat groups connecting them with volunteers. On Saturday, the Wuhan Small Animal Protection Association, which is providing food and water to pets in isolation, said it had helped more than 600 pets in the last week.

One Wuhan resident who asked to be identified as Lao Mao, or Old Cat, told Reuters that his team of volunteers had rescued more than 1,000 pets since Jan. 25, and estimated that as many as 50,000 pets remained unattended in the city.

But gaining entry to locked apartments and buildings, even with the permission of the owners, has been a challenge.

In one daring instance, Lao Mao said, he climbed up rusty pipes to feed two cats in a third-floor apartment that had been left alone for 10 days. He found the cats barely alive under a sofa.

When he video-called the owners, who could not return to Wuhan because of roadblocks, they cried.

“My phone never stops ringing these days. I barely sleep,” he said.

There is no evidence that companion animals like dogs and cats can be infected with the new coronavirus, according to the World Health Organization.

Australia evacuated more than 200 citizens from Wuhan, and then quarantined them.

A planeload of Australians evacuated from China’s Wuhan city arrived in the Indian Ocean territory of Christmas Island, where they are to be quarantined, Reuters reported on Tuesday.

The Qantas Airways 747 carrying 243 passengers, 14 crew members, four pilots and officials from the Department of Health landed at a military air base about 700 miles north of Perth. The passengers were then transferred to two smaller planes bound for Christmas Island, according to the Australian Broadcasting Corp.

The first of the chartered flights landed on the island at 9 p.m. Monday. Officials were not immediately available to confirm the arrival of the second charter flight.

Another evacuation flight from Wuhan chartered by Air New Zealand, with 70 New Zealanders and an unspecified number of Australians on board, was expected to arrive in Auckland on Tuesday, The New Zealand Herald reported.

There were 600 Australians registered in the Hubei region as of last week, and the Australian government has said it will consider further evacuations if needed.

Australia on Saturday followed the United States in barring entry to all foreign citizens traveling from mainland China and raised its travel warning for China to the highest level, advising people against visiting the country.

No cases in Mexico, but Uber accounts are suspended over the virus.

Even in countries still seemingly untouched by the outbreak, precautions are being ramped up. That was the situation in Mexico over the weekend.

There are no confirmed cases of the new coronavirus in the country, according to the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But on Friday and Saturday, Uber temporarily suspended the accounts of 240 users in Mexico City to guard against the spread of the virus, the ride-hailing company said.

Uber made the decision after learning that a person with the virus traveled from Los Angeles to Mexico City last month and rode with two Uber drivers there, a company spokesman said.

The Mexico City Health Department alerted Uber, and Uber suspended the drivers, as well as other passengers they had picked up.

“Out of an abundance of caution, we temporarily suspended the accounts of two drivers who had transported the individual, as well as approximately 240 other users who had been in contact with those drivers,” the spokesman, Andrew Hasbun, said in a statement.

A steady climb in infections in China, but some encouraging news, too.

The death toll from the new coronavirus has exceeded that of the severe acute respiratory syndrome outbreak in 2002 and 2003 in mainland China. But the number of people who have recovered nationwide has also risen in recent days, suggesting that the new virus’s fatality rate is relatively low.

China’s Health Commission reported on Tuesday that there were 632 recoveries and more than 420 deaths nationwide. During the SARS outbreak, 349 people died in mainland China.

Health experts say they are encouraged by the steady rise in the number of recoveries. They take it as evidence that the treatments meted out have been effective and that the virus does not appear to be as deadly as SARS.

SARS had a mortality rate of 9.6 percent, and about 2 percent of those reported to have been infected with the new coronavirus have died.

China first announced an outbreak in the city of Wuhan on Dec. 31. The authorities later began to place the city and much of the surrounding Hubei Province — home to tens of millions of people — under lockdown.

Japan quarantines a ship with 3,700 aboard after finding the coronavirus.

Japan has quarantined around 3,700 people aboard a cruise ship off the port city of Yokohama after one of the passengers tested positive for the new coronavirus, the Japanese news media and the authorities said on Tuesday.

The passenger, an 80-year-old resident of Hong Kong, boarded the ship in Yokohama on Jan. 20, the national broadcaster NHK reported. He arrived five days later in Hong Kong, where he disembarked and was diagnosed, it said.

The ship traveled to Vietnam, Taiwan and the Japanese island of Okinawa before returning to Yokohama, where it is currently anchored.

Passengers are being held on the ship as they wait for officials from Japan’s Health Ministry to test them for the coronavirus, the chief cabinet secretary Yoshihide Suga said during a regular news briefing on Tuesday.

“The quarantine office will make an appropriate judgment about whether we will approve the ship to dock and passengers to disembark,” he said, adding that the quarantine office would make the decision based on guidelines from the World Health Organization.

Reporting was contributed by Daniel Victor, Elaine Yu, Tiffany May, Steven Lee Myers, Damien Cave, Paul Mozur, Ben Dooley, Hisako Ueno, Kate Conger and Isabella Kwai.

Let's block ads! (Why?)