China: People transmit new virus
World health group calls emergency meeting Wednesday
BEIJING — The head of a Chinese government expert team said Monday that human-to-human transmission has been confirmed in an outbreak of a new coronavirus, a development that raises the possibility that it could spread more quickly and widely.
Team leader Zhong Nanshan, a respiratory expert, said two people in Guangdong province in southern China caught the virus from family members, state media said. Some medical workers have also tested positive for the virus, the English-language China Daily newspaper reported.
The late-night announcement capped a day in which authorities announced a sharp uptick in the number of confirmed cases to more than 200, and China’s leader called on the government to take every possible step to combat the outbreak.
“The recent outbreak of novel coronavirus pneumonia in Wuhan and other places must be taken seriously,” President Xi Jinping said in his first public statement on the crisis. “Party committees, governments and relevant departments at all levels should put people’s lives and health first.”
Xi’s remarks were reported by state broadcaster CCTV on its main 7 p.m. evening news broadcast.
In Geneva, the World Health Organization announced it would convene an Emergency Committee meeting Wednesday to determine whether the outbreak warrants being declared a global health crisis.
Such declarations are typically made for epidemics of severe diseases that threaten to cross borders and require an internationally coordinated response. Previous global emergencies have been declared for crises including the ongoing Ebola outbreak in Congo, the emergence of Zika virus in the Americas in 2016 and the West Africa Ebola outbreak in 2014.
The timing of the viral pneumonia outbreak could hardly be worse. China’s Ministry of Transport expects 3 billion trips to be taken in the
40 days that surround Lunar New Year’s Day, which falls on Saturday.
The Spring Festival, signaling the dawn of a new lunar year — Saturday marks the beginning of the Year of the Rat, according to the Chinese zodiac — is the most important holiday on the Chinese calendar. It is a period when migrant workers of all stripes, from those who labor in factories to upwardly mobile professionals in big cities, return to their hometowns. It is often the only time each year that families can gather together.
China’s multitudinous trains are packed literally to the rafters during this odyssey. People lie under the seats in sleeper cars and crouch in the hallways or in the vestibules between train cars. It’s not unheard of for people, even adults, to contort themselves into the overhead luggage racks. Those who are not so lucky might find themselves standing for a 12-hour journey home.
Despite the crush, the atmosphere on the trains is convivial and filled with the aroma of instant noodles. Almost everyone is excited to be going home and eager to share their snacks and bottles of baijiu liquor with one another, although some try not to drink a drop of anything to avoid having to go to the bathroom and potentially lose their few inches of real estate.
But as China becomes wealthier, and as more young professionals dread the idea of going home to be harangued about still being single, many people opt out of the spring movement by going abroad. Southeast Asia is a popular destination because it’s close, warm and cheap.
As a result, authorities in neighboring countries are also on high alert.
Cases of the mystery coronavirus have now been confirmed in Thailand and Japan, and on Monday, a woman was quarantined after thermal detectors at South Korea’s main airport, Incheon, singled her out. Health authorities in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore and Vietnam are also monitoring suspected cases.
Three international airports in the United States — Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York’s John F. Kennedy — have started screening passengers on flights from China.
Canada’s chief medical officer, Dr. Theresa Tam, said additional signs will be in place in the coming days at airports in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. There will also be additional screening questions at electronic kiosks at customs asking people if they have traveled to areas where coronavirus is and if they have flu-like symptoms.
The virus appears to have started in a fresh food market in Wuhan, a city of 11 million people that straddles the Yangtze River in central China. The market sold wild and exotic animals for consumption, including snakes, marmots, frogs and hedgehogs.
State media reports described the market as “filthy and messy,” and it has been closed down and disinfected.
Coronaviruses cause diseases ranging from the common cold to severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, which first infected people in southern China in late 2002 and spread to more than two dozen countries, killing nearly 800 people. The Chinese government initially tried to conceal the severity of the SARS epidemic, but its cover-up was exposed by a high-ranking physician.
“In the early days of SARS, reports were delayed and covered up,” said an editorial in the nationalistic Global Times. “That kind of thing must not happen again in China.”