Coronavirus Live Updates: Death Toll Reaches 56 as U.S. Finds Third Case - The New York Times

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People wearing protective masks leaving a store after stocking up on food at a market in Wuhan, China, on Sunday. — Credit...Hector Retamal/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The death toll rises to 56, with one fatality in Shanghai.

China on Sunday morning announced 15 more deaths from the new coronavirus, including one in Shanghai, the first reported so far in the metropolis.

Thirteen more deaths were also announced in Hubei Province, where the outbreak began, and one was announced in Henan Province. The latest deaths brought the toll in China to 56.

Across the country, 688 cases of the new virus were diagnosed on Saturday, the government said early Sunday. That brings the total number of confirmed cases to 1,975.

Wuhan Coronavirus Map: Tracking the Spread of the Outbreak

The virus has sickened more than 1,900 people in China and a handful in other countries.

Deaths from the coronavirus had previously been reported outside of Hubei, the outbreak’s epicenter. But the death in Shanghai, which is among China’s most populous cities and a major commercial hub, is likely to add to anxieties about the disease’s spread.

Shanghai’s municipal health commission said on Sunday that the patient who died was an 88-year-old man.

A third U.S. case has been confirmed in California.

A person in Orange County, California, has tested positive for the novel coronavirus. The Orange County Health Care Agency, which received confirmation from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said the individual had been sent to a hospital and is in “good condition.”

The patient is a traveler from Wuhan, China, and “there is no evidence that person-to-person transmission has occurred in Orange County,” according to the agency. “The current risk of local transmission remains low,” the agency said in a statement.

It is the third confirmed case in the United States. The others involved a woman in her 60s in Chicago, and a man in his 30s in Washington state.

Global concern grows as the outbreak spreads.

Public health officials in Toronto announced on Saturday night that test results showed that Canada has its first “presumptive” case of coronavirus.

Dr. Barbara Yaffe, Ontario’s associate chief medical officer of health, said the patient is a man in his 50s who returned to Toronto on Jan. 22 after visiting Wuhan, China. The following day he was admitted to a major Toronto hospital with a respiratory infection. He is now in stable condition.

Dr. David Williams, Ontario’s chief medical officer of health, said that while they “are convinced” they have a positive case, a government laboratory in Winnipeg, Manitoba, will run additional tests for confirmation, which is why health officials are still calling it presumptive.

On Saturday, Portugal’s health ministry said in a statement that doctors were monitoring and treating a patient in the Curry Cabral hospital in Lisbon, who is believed to have contracted the virus during a recent stay in Wuhan. The patient, whose identity was not disclosed, was described as being in a stable condition. The Portuguese ministry is awaiting the results of hospital tests to confirm the virus.

In a sign of the growing global dread about the disease, Taiwan said on Sunday that it would bar all visitors from China’s Hubei Province to the self-governing island, where a handful of cases have been confirmed. Taiwan’s government also said it would suspend applications from Chinese citizens for travel permits except in special cases, such as disease control or humanitarian medical assistance.

The central government in China is deploying hundreds of workers.

In a sign that the central government was ramping up its response to contain the outbreak, China’s National Health Commission said it would send 1,230 medical experts to Wuhan to assist in treatment.

The army has sent another 450 people, from three military medical universities, to Wuhan, according to a state media article that the health commission shared on its website. And the air force sent military transport aircraft to the cities of Shanghai, Xi’an and Chongqing to pick up emergency airlifts of medical team members and medical supplies for Wuhan.

In Wuhan, health officials said that they would assign 24 general hospitals to treat potential coronavirus patients only, according to People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s main newspaper. National officials had called on Saturday for patients to be concentrated in specialized hospitals, and new hospitals were being built specifically to treat patients.

China temporarily halts the trade in wildlife across the country.

China has temporarily banned the wildlife trade nationwide until the epidemic of coronavirus has passed, three government departments said in a joint statement on Sunday.

The outbreak has drawn fresh attention to China’s animal markets, where the sale of exotic wildlife has been linked to epidemiological risks. The Wuhan virus is believed to have spread from one such market in the city. The SARS outbreak nearly two decades ago was also traced back to the wildlife trade.

Sunday’s statement, which was jointly issued by China’s markets regulator, agriculture ministry and forestry bureau, said that all transactions of wildlife would be forbidden immediately in wholesale markets, supermarkets, restaurants and e-commerce platforms. The statement also encourages consumers to understand the health risks of eating wild animals.

The consumption of exotic creatures has been driven partly by beliefs about their supposed health benefits, although such ideas are starting to lose their grip, particularly on younger people.

A popular travel blogger, Wang Mengyun, apologized on social media recently for eating bat soup in a video from a few years ago.

Ms. Wang, who has more than 2 million followers on the social platform Weibo, said that she had been unaware of the health risks of eating bats when she made the video in the Pacific island nation of Palau. She said she had just been trying to highlight the local cuisine.

In her post, Ms. Wang said she wanted to make clear that the bat she ate in the video was locally raised and not wild. “Many countries around the world eat these,” she wrote.

Her post has since been deleted.

Americans in Wuhan are being evacuated to San Francisco.

The United States government offered details on its plan to evacuate American diplomats and private citizens from the stricken city of Wuhan, saying on Sunday that it was arranging a flight that would leave on Tuesday and travel to San Francisco.

The State Department has ordered all American employees at the United States Consulate in Wuhan to leave the city. In an email sent on Sunday to Americans living in China, the department asked all other citizens who wanted a spot on the plane to contact the embassy in advance. Capacity would be “extremely limited,” the message said, and priority would be given to people at greater risk from the virus.

It is unclear who exactly will fall into that category.

Jonny Dangerfield, 30, is an American who came to Wuhan to celebrate the Lunar New Year with his wife and children.

Mr. Dangerfield, who works in finance in Phoenix, said he hoped that his family might be given priority on the flight because of his three young children, all of whom are below the age of 5.

“If it weren’t for them, we maybe would not have much worry at all,” he said in a telephone interview.

He and his family are staying with his in-laws in Wuhan, and the increased cost of food in the city has not been as large a burden as it might be to the city’s poorer residents. That makes him feel like one of the lucky ones in this whole situation.

“Just to keep ourselves sane, I guess, we have low expectations about getting on that plane,” Mr. Dangerfield said.

Authorities in France have said that they plan to provide a bus service for French nationals and their families who want to leave Wuhan. The Russian embassy is working with Chinese authorities to evacuate Russian citizens from the area.

Hong Kong, reeling from protests, takes a new hit from the virus.

In Hong Kong, the virus is further dampening the hobbled tourism industry, which already has been hit by months of antigovernment protests.

Two of the city’s biggest attractions, Disneyland and Ocean Park, said on Sunday that they were closing until further notice. A notice on Hong Kong Disneyland’s website called it a “precautionary measure.”

Shanghai’s Disneyland park earlier had been shut indefinitely. China on Saturday had said that it would suspend all tour groups and the sale of flight and hotel packages for its citizens headed overseas starting on Monday. The weeklong Lunar New Year holiday, which began on Saturday, is usually a peak travel period in China.

Tourists had already been scared off from Hong Kong by the steady stream of violent, tear gas-clouded confrontations between police officers and protesters. The effects of the tourism slowdown have rippled across the city’s economy, which depends in significant part on money spent by visitors at malls, hotels and restaurants. Hong Kong is now in a recession.

The semiautonomous territory’s leader, Carrie Lam, declared a health emergency on Saturday and said Hong Kong schools would be closed until February.

A rigid bureaucracy slowed the response to an emerging crisis.

The coronavirus outbreak seemed to be a full-blown crisis by the time the first news reports emerged: Dozens of people had already been infected, even some abroad.

Though the delay may suggest a cover-up, experts see something different, and more worrying: weaknesses at the heart of the Chinese political system.

China’s rigid bureaucracy discourages local officials from raising bad news with central bosses and it silos officials off from one another, making it harder to manage, or even see, a crisis in the making.

“That’s why you never really hear about problems emerging on a local scale in China,” said John Yasuda, who studies China’s approach to health crises at Indiana University. “By the time that we hear about it, and that the problem reaches the central government, it’s because it’s become a huge problem.”

Those systemic flaws appear to have played a role in the pace at which officials responded to the outbreak, and the country’s inability to address the health risks from its so-called wet markets, which are stuffed with livestock living and dead, domesticated and wild.

China is now mobilizing a nationwide response involving hundreds of personnel, one of the system’s strengths.

But the country’s political weaknesses can have serious consequences for the world. Disease and pollution don’t respect borders, so a unified national policy is typically needed to prevent or stop them.

For any health or environmental regulation to work, Mr. Yasuda said, “you want it to be standardized, you want it to be transparent, you want it to be accountable.”

Reporting was contributed by Raymond Zhong, Max Fisher, Vivian Wang, Ian Austen and Raphael Minder.

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