Infections drop:
People wearing face masks next to a bull sculpture at the Bund in Shanghai. China on Sunday reported its lowest number of new coronavirus infections since January, with nearly all the 44 new cases in the outbreak epicentre of Wuhan.
It is shortly after 8pm on a mild Cape Town summer evening as the kitchen doors swing open in the Sea Palace Chinese restaurant and a man emerges with a tray of food. It is not destined for diners but for his family upstairs.
Not a single table in the cavernous establishment is occupied. A lone crayfish stirs in a slowly bubbling tank at the entrance and music echoes from the loudspeaker as the Sea Palace prepares to close for the night.
“I’ve had this business since 1992. This has never happened before,” says its manager, Qing Chen. “Usually 70%-80% of my business is Chinese tourists. Now they are not coming,” she says.
Chen is at the front line of SA businesses hard hit by the novel coronavirus outbreak that emerged in China late in 2019. China has borne the brunt of the epidemic, but the virus, called Sars-CoV-2, and the disease it causes, Covid-19, have rapidly spread. By Sunday, Covid-19 had sickened more than 107,300 people and killed more than 3,640 people across 107 countries and territories, according to the Johns Hopkins tracker.
Last Thursday SA became Africa’s seventh nation to confirm a case, a 38-year-old man who had travelled to Italy, the epicentre of Europe’s outbreak. His wife and a woman who travelled with them to Italy have since been diagnosed with the illness, and the government has deployed tracer teams to track down their contacts.
China cancelled all outbound group tours in late January, as it aggressively sought to contain the virus, which is said to spread mainly from person to person through droplet infection. The tour ban delivered a direct hit to local businesses such as Sea Palace that have over the years carved out a market niche almost entirely dependent on Chinese tourists. The outlook remains bleak, says Wesgro CEO Tim Harris.
Travel from China to SA is projected to decline by 85% in the next six months, he says, citing research by ForwardKeys. While Chinese visitors account for 3.5% of the international arrivals to the Western Cape, the local tourism industry is reporting that potential visitors from other destinations are also cancelling or postponing bookings, he says. “We anticipate that this decline will mirror global trends.”
As the world’s largest exporter, China contributes about a third of the world’s manufacturing output.
Chinese authorities shuttered the “factory of the world” to contain the virus, with a knock-on effect on the myriad supply chains it feeds.
Industries as diverse as construction and retail face supply chain risks, says Cape Chamber of Commerce & Industry president Geoff Jacobs.
“Should ships be delayed or prevented from leaving China to deliver to us, it would cause bottlenecks,” he says.
The ramifications are already being felt in SA, which counts China as its biggest trading partner: imports from China topped $17bn in 2018, according to the UN Comtrade database on international trade.
JSE-listed companies ranging from gem producers to retailers have been issuing warnings to investors. Roughdiamond
seller De Beers said sales fell by more than a third in February as concerns about Covid-19 affected customers that supply China, while alcoholic beverage maker AB InBev lost out on $285m in sales and $170m in earnings in the first two months of 2020 due to the virus.
Retail giant Shoprite projects a R100m knock in turnover due to difficulties sourcing products such as heaters and electric blankets from China, while Woolworths is expecting trouble procuring imported items in coming weeks.
Local pharmaceutical manufacturers say they are keeping a close eye on potential disruption to the supply of active pharmaceutical ingredients used to formulate medicines, and SA’s medicines regulator has promised to expedite the process for approving supplier changes should the need arise.
Exporters face both a slump in demand and potential problems unloading their cargo if dock workers are affected by the virus, says Jacobs. SA’s agricultural sector could lose as much as R39.23bn in export revenue due to the outbreak, as Asia accounts for a quarter of its exports, according to the Agriculture Business Chamber.
Even companies that do not have direct links to China have felt pain, as investors abandoned emerging-market stocks and sought havens in gold and US Treasuries. The coronavirus has battered financial markets and sent global stocks tumbling at a rate last seen during the 2008 global economic crisis. Almost R1-trillion was wiped from the JSE all share index in the last week of February.
Italy ordered a virtual lockdown across a swathe of its wealthy north on Sunday, including the financial capital, Milan, in a drastic new attempt to try to contain a rapidly growing outbreak of coronavirus.
The unprecedented restrictions, which will affect about 16-million people and stay in force until April 3, were signed into law by Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte. The new measures say that people should not enter or leave Lombardy, Italy’s richest region, as well as 14 provinces in four other regions, including the cities of Venice, Modena, Parma, Piacenza, Reggio Emilia and Rimini.
Conte said nobody would be allowed to move in or out of these areas, or within them, unless they had proven, workrelated reasons for doing so, or health issues.
“We are facing a national emergency. We chose from the beginning to take the line of truth and transparency and now we’re moving with lucidity and courage, with firmness and determination,” Conte told reporters on Saturday night.
“We have to limit the spread of the virus and prevent our hospitals from being overwhelmed,” he said.
Streets in northern cities including Milan were quieter than normal on Sunday morning. But it was not immediately clear how stringently the order would be policed. People who were caught away from home when the measures came into force were allowed to return.
By early Sunday the measures had still not appeared in the Official Gazette, where legislation must be published to formally take effect.
Milan airport authorities said services were so far operating normally, pending official notification of the new measures, while trains were running across the north.
According to the decree, all museums, gyms, cultural centres, ski resorts and swimming pools will be shut in the targeted zones.
Leave was cancelled for health workers as Italy’s hospitals sag under the pressure.
Restaurants and bars will be allowed to open from 6am to 6pm if they can guarantee that customers are at least 1m apart.
Church services on Sunday were cancelled in the region, and the Vatican announced that Pope Francis would make his weekly Sunday blessing via a video link-up rather than directly from St Peter’s Square to limit the risk of contagion.
The government enacted its draft order just hours after officials announced that the number of coronavirus cases had leapt by more than 1,200 in a 24-hour period — the biggest daily rise since the epidemic began in the country two weeks ago.
Deaths from the virus had also risen, by 36 to 233, while the number of patients in intensive care climbed to 567, up 23% from the day before.
Of the 5,883 Italians originally infected, 589 have fully recovered, but the hospital system has come under increasing strain.
“We’re now being forced to set up intensive-care treatment in corridors, in operating theatres, in recovery rooms. We’ve emptied entire hospital sections to make space for seriously sick people,” Antonio Pesenti, head of the Lombardy regional crisis response unit, told the Corriere della Sera newspaper.
“One of the best health systems in the world, in Lombardy, is a step away from collapse,” he said.
The northern regions of Lombardy, Emilia-Romagna and Veneto represent 85% of all cases and 92% of recorded deaths.
On Sunday the head of Piedmont region said he had tested positive for the virus. He was the second regional chief to be infected in 24 hours.
As the alarm spread, Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis said Italy should ban all its citizens from travelling to Europe.
On Saturday, health officials expressed alarm at the apparent lack of concern in the public, as fine weekend weather attracted large crowds to the ski slopes outside Milan.
But local Italian politicians have pushed back against the measures, which leaked out before regional governors were consulted. The president of Lombardy, Attilio Fontana, said that the proposals went “in the right direction” but added that they were a “mess”.
The head of neighbouring Veneto, Luca Zaia, complained he had not been properly consulted and was unhappy that three provinces in his region, including Venice, had been included. “We do not understand the rationale of a measure that appears scientifically disproportionate to the epidemiological trend,” he wrote on Facebook.
WE HAVE TO LIMIT THE SPREAD OF THE VIRUS AND PREVENT OUR HOSPITALS FROM BEING OVERWHELMED