Here’s what you need to know:
China’s leader calls the outbreak a ‘crisis and a big test.’
China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, told officials at a Communist Party meeting on Sunday that the coronavirus epidemic was “a crisis and a big test” for the country.
Mr. Xi acknowledged “obvious shortcomings in the response to the epidemic,” but did not give details, adding that officials should “learn lessons” and improve the country’s ability to respond to public health emergencies.
He said the outbreak in China presented “the fastest spread, the widest scope of infections and the greatest degree of difficulty in controlling infections” of any public health emergency since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, according to the official Xinhua News Agency.
Mr. Xi called situation “severely complex” and warned that prevention and control measures were at their “most crucial stage.”
He acknowledged that the outbreak would have social and economic effects and pledged to take measures to ease the burdens on the country’s workers and businesses. He called for an orderly return to work in places with low and medium risk, and said that areas with high risk of spreading the virus must focus on prevention and control measures.
Mr. Xi said the government would look to fiscal policies including tax cuts to help small and medium-size businesses, and work to reduce barriers to the flow of people and goods.
But, saying that the government’s response reflected well upon the party’s leadership, he said that its judgment on the epidemic was “accurate, all work deployments are timely and the measures adopted have been forceful and effective.”
“The results achieved by the prevention and control work again display the outstanding superiority of the leadership of the Communist Party of China and socialism with Chinese characteristics,” Mr. Xi said.
The meeting was attended by members of the Communist Party and government leadership, and was broadcast to about 170,000 officials across the country, the state media said.
The Chinese authorities recently acknowledged that Mr. Xi had been aware of the outbreak nearly two weeks before he first spoke about it, a revised timeline that put him at the center of efforts to control the outbreak.
That declaration was seen as a risk because it left Mr. Xi, China’s most powerful leader since the Mao era, open to questions over whether the government moved quickly enough.
South Korea’s leader urges an ‘all-out, concerted response.’
President Moon Jae-in on Sunday put South Korea on the highest possible alert in its fight against the coronavirus, a move that empowers the government to lock down cities and take other sweeping measures to contain the outbreak.
“The coming few days will be a critical time for us,” he said at an emergency meeting of government officials to discuss the outbreak, which in just days has spiraled to 602 confirmed infections and six deaths. “The central government, local governments, health officials and medical personnel and the entire people must wage an all-out, concerted response to the problem.”
By raising the alert to Level 4, or “serious,” Mr. Moon authorized the government to take steps like barring visitors from specific countries and restricting public transportation, as well as locking down cities, as China has done.
Many of South Korea’s coronavirus cases are in the southeastern city of Daegu, which has essentially been placed under a state of emergency, though people are still free to enter and leave the city. A 59-year-old man on Sunday was the sixth person to die in the country after contracting the virus.
More than half of the people confirmed to have been infected are either members of the Shincheonji Church of Jesus, a secretive religious sect with a strong presence in Daegu, or their relatives or other contacts.
Prime Minister Chung Sye-kyun had urged people on Saturday to comply with a ban on large protests in Seoul, the capital, where large political demonstrations are commonplace. But thousands of Christian activists defied the ban that day, gathering for their weekly protest against Mr. Moon, whom they accuse of coddling North Korea and mismanaging the economy.
The spike of cases in South Korea, along with rising numbers in Iran and Italy, has added to fears that the window to avert a global pandemic is narrowing. The World Health Organization has warned African leaders of the urgent need to prepare for the virus; it identified 13 African countries as priorities because of their direct links to China, which accounts for the vast majority of confirmed infections and deaths.
On Sunday, China raised its official numbers to 76,936 cases and 2,442 deaths.
Iran, saying eight have died, closes schools across 14 provinces.
Pakistan and Turkey temporarily closed their borders with Iran on Sunday, as Tehran announced that it would close schools, universities and cultural centers across 14 provinces in an effort to curb the coronavirus. The outbreak has killed at least eight people in Iran, state television said.
Although the origin of the outbreak in Iran is unclear, the Fars news agency on Sunday quoted the country’s health minister as saying that Chinese carriers of the virus were a source of the outbreak in Iran.
Just days ago, Iran said it was untouched by the virus, and the sudden increase in cases has raised concerns that it may be experiencing a significant outbreak. Iran’s health ministry said Saturday that 43 people had tested positive, with eight deaths, state-run Press TV reported.
Experts have said that based on the number of dead, the total number of cases is probably much higher, as Covid-19 appears to kill about one out of 50 people infected.
Pakistan’s 596-mile border with Iran is mostly porous, and controlling a potential spread of the coronavirus poses a major challenge.
“Due to the very serious nature of coronavirus outbreak in Iran, we have to take stringent precautionary measures,” Mir Zia Ullah, the home minister of Baluchistan Province, which borders Iran, said by telephone. “All kind of movement has been suspended.”
He said officials planned to meet on Monday to assess how long to keep the border closed.
Turkey’s health minister, Fahrettin Koca, said in a news conference, “Because of the fact that the picture in Iran is getting worse, we decided to temporarily shut down our border with our neighbor.”
“Land and rail crossings from Iran to our country will be stopped as of 5 p.m.,” he added. “All international flights will be temporarily and one-sidedly stopped as of 8 p.m.”
Turkey has four border gates to Iran, and all of them were shut down.
Eight Iranians who were showing signs of cold, such as fever and coughing were denied entry to Turkey over the last two days, Mr. Koca said.
In Iran, eight of the 10 new cases were in the city of Qom, Press TV reported, citing a health ministry spokesman, Kianush Jahanpur. Qom has been the epicenter of the outbreak in Iran, and mosques and schools were closed there on Thursday.
Mehr, an Iranian news agency, reported that the government had begun mass distribution of masks in cities affected by the outbreak.
The closing of schools, universities and cultural centers will last a week.
The authorities have also said that concerts and cultural events would be canceled for a week and movie theaters closed, while sports competitions will be held without spectators, state television reported.
Cases in Italy rise, and the Venice Carnival is canceled.
The number of confirmed coronavirus cases in Italy has risen by 89, officials said on Sunday, bringing the country’s total to 132.
Officials also announced two cases in Venice for the first time, as the number of cases in Veneto, where Venice is the capital, rose to 25.
On Sunday, officials also canceled the last two days of the Venice carnival, which draws thousands of people from around the world.
The announcement was made after an estimate 20,000 people attended a carnival event in St. Mark’s Square on Sunday morning. Carnival activities, which began on Feb. 8 with tens of thousands of people gathering in St. Mark’s, were to end on Tuesday.
Ten towns in the Lombardy region have been placed on lockdown, a decision affecting more than 50,000 people, after 88 coronavirus infections emerged there. And as new cases arose in other cities, Italy’s cabinet passed emergency measures late Saturday night that apply throughout the country.
Those national guidelines oblige local officials to “take all appropriate containment measures” if someone tests positive for the virus. Quarantine measures will be applied to anyone who has close contact with someone who has contracted the virus, and areas where positive cases are confirmed will be placed on lockdown.
“We are trying to contain a phenomenon, but it’s not a pandemic,” Giulio Gallera, the councilor responsible for health in Lombardy, said in a news conference on Saturday.
The lockdown in that region, announced late Friday, has closed schools, businesses, and bus and train stations. Officials have banned all public events, including sporting activities and religious ceremonies. Other Lombardy towns not affected by the lockdown have decided on their own restrictive measures.
Soccer matches on Sunday were canceled in Lombardy and Veneto. Two trade fairs scheduled for this month in Milan were postponed, and the mayor of Milan on Sunday asked that schools in the city be closed for a week.
Of the country’s coronavirus patients, 26 are in intensive care and two people have died, including a 77-year-old woman and a 78-year-old man, officials said.
Third death linked to the Diamond Princess is reported.
A third person connected with the Diamond Princess cruise ship at the center of a coronavirus outbreak has died of pneumonia, according to Japan’s health ministry. A Japanese man in his 80s, who was taken off the ship to a hospital on Feb. 5, died on Sunday.
At the request of the man’s family, the ministry did not specify whether he had tested positive for the coronavirus or whether he had been a passenger on the ship.
The ministry said on Sunday that an additional 55 crew members and two passengers had tested positive for the coronavirus, bringing the total number of confirmed cases associated with the ship to 634.
Fifty of the new confirmed cases currently showed no symptoms, the ministry said. It did not indicate whether those who had tested positive were being quarantined on board the ship or had been taken to hospitals.
The Diamond Princess was subject to a government-mandated quarantine for two weeks in Yokohama, Japan. The government’s handling of the outbreak on the ship — the largest concentration of cases outside China — has been the subject of stinging criticism.
Others who worked on the ship will return to work but will be tested for infection, Health Minister Katsunobu Kato said on Saturday, adding that 41 officials would be tested for now.
The U.S. State Department had raised its travel advisories for Japan and South Korea on Saturday to Level 2, the second-lowest out of four grades, recommending that travelers “exercise increased caution” because of the coronavirus outbreak.
Another Wuhan doctor dies after contracting the coronavirus.
A 29-year-old doctor in Wuhan, the Chinese city where the coronavirus emerged, died from the virus on Sunday, according to the hospital where she worked. It was at least the third death in a week among doctors fighting the outbreak in Wuhan.
The death of Dr. Xia Sisi, a 29-year-old gastroenterologist, was announced by Xiehe Jiangbei Hospital. In a statement, it said that she had become sick after treating coronavirus patients and that she had begun receiving treatment at the hospital on Jan. 19. She had been transferred to another hospital in the city after her condition worsened.
Her death came three days after another 29-year-old doctor in Wuhan, Peng Yinhua, died after contracting the coronavirus. Dr. Peng, a specialist in respiratory diseases, had postponed his wedding to fight the virus, according to local news reports.
The director of a Wuhan hospital, Liu Zhiming, a 51-year-old neurosurgeon, died on Tuesday after contracting the virus, according to the Wuhan health commission.
The death this month of Li Wenliang, a Wuhan ophthalmologist who had been reprimanded by the authorities for warning medical school classmates about the outbreak in its early days, stirred an outpouring of grief and anger across China.
A vast U.S. containment effort relies on local officials.
Since early February, thousands of people returning to the United States from mainland China have been asked to isolate themselves at home for 14 days. Preventing the spread of infectious disease is the essence of public health work, but the scale of efforts by state and local health departments across the country to contain any potential spread of the coronavirus has rarely been seen, experts said.
Local health officials check in daily by email, phone or text. They arrange tests for people who come down with symptoms, along with groceries and isolated housing, in some cases. There is no centralized tally in the United States of people being monitored or asked to remain in isolation, and they are scattered across the nation’s nearly 3,000 local health jurisdictions.
People arriving from mainland China are added each day, while those who have completed 14-day “self-quarantine” periods are released from oversight. In California alone, the department of public health has been monitoring more than 6,700 returning travelers from China. Health officials in Washington State have tracked about 800, and officials in Illinois more than 200.
Even as the first of 34 confirmed coronavirus patients in the United States have recovered in recent days, health officials say they are preparing for what some fear could still be a much wider outbreak.
So far, officials say, the containment effort has been largely orderly. The only known transmission of the virus in the United States has involved people in the same household. But no matter how effective health workers are in monitoring their charges, “there will always be some leakage,’’ said John Wiesman, the secretary of health in Washington State.
“There is no way, with something this large, that you can make it seal-proof,’’ Dr. Wiesman said. While enforcing total compliance with isolation orders may not be possible, he said, “We have to try for 80 to 85 percent, and hopefully that will work.’’
Russian disinformation blames the U.S. for the virus.
State Department officials say that thousands of Russia-linked social media accounts are spreading disinformation about the coronavirus, including a conspiracy theory that the United States is behind the Covid-19 outbreak.
American monitors identified the campaign in mid-January. Agence-France Presse first reported on the assessment on Saturday.
“Russia’s intent is to sow discord and undermine U.S. institutions and alliances from within, including through covert and coercive malign influence campaigns,” said Philip Reeker, the acting assistant secretary of state for Europe and Eurasia.
“By spreading disinformation about coronavirus, Russian malign actors are once again choosing to threaten public safety by distracting from the global health response.”
The effort was described as being carried out by several thousand Russia-linked accounts on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter, which post similar messages at similar times in English, Spanish, French, German and Italian.
Fringe theories of uncertain origin have accused China of engineering the virus, including suggestions that it is an escaped bioweapon.
Misinformation about the virus — whether shared purposefully or unwittingly — is so rife that the World Health Organization has called it an “infodemic.” The W.H.O. has been working with big tech companies to try to quell the flood of rumors and falsehoods.
Reporting was contributed by Choe Sang-Hun, Elisabetta Povoledo, Austin Ramzy, Motoko Rich, Makiko Inoue, Salman Masood, Derrick Bryson Taylor, Tess Felder, Amy Harmon, Farah Stockman, Edward Wong and Vivian Wang.
2020-02-23 13:30:14Z
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