Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
China tightens lockdown on Wuhan
With more than 600 deaths tied to coronavirus, authorities conducting house searches, mass internments.
WUHAN, China — Chinese authorities strengthened their coronavirus lockdown Thursday in a desperate move to contain the deadly scourge of infections, ordering house-tohouse searches, rounding up the sick and warehousing them in a convention center and other buildings converted into makeshift quarantine internment camps.
The steps were announced by the top official leading the response to the outbreak as she visited the central Chinese city of Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak.
The steps announced by the official, Vice Premier Sun Chunlan, evoked images of the emergency measures taken to combat the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic that killed 20 million people worldwide. The severity of the new restrictions risked creating a humanitarian disaster in Wuhan, a metropolis of 11 million.
The city and country face “wartime conditions,” Sun said during the visit. “There must be no deserters, or they will be nailed to the pillar of historical shame forever.”
She ordered medical workers to mobilize into round-the-clock shifts to visit each home in Wuhan, check the temperature of all residents and interview close contacts of any infected patients.
The new measures came two weeks after China barred people from leaving Wuhan, then expanded the restriction to cities in the central province of Hubei and now confines more than 50 million people. Yet the number of confirmed infections has doubled roughly every four days, and experts have questioned whether the government’s
actions are imposing undue hardship on people while doing little to slow the epidemic.
Government figures Friday showed the virus has killed at least 636 people and infected at least 31,161, and many believe those official statistics are far from complete.
Authorities have begun to direct patients in Wuhan to makeshift hospitals that are intended to house thousands of people. It was not clear whether the new shelters were equipped or staffed to provide even basic care to patients and protect against spreading the virus.
“This is almost a humanitarian disaster because there are not sufficient medical supplies,” said Willy Wo-Lap Lam, an adjunct professor at the Center for China Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. “The Wuhan people seem to be left high and dry by themselves.”
A doctor who got in trouble with Chinese authorities for sounding an early warning about the outbreak died Friday after coming down with the illness, a hospital reported.
The Wuhan Central Hospital said Dr. Li Wenliang, a 34-year-old ophthalmologist, was “unfortunately infected during the fight against the pneumonia epi
demic of the new coronavirus infection.”
Li was reprimanded by local police for “spreading rumors” about the illness in late December, according to news reports.
A newborn in China became the youngest known person infected with the virus.
The baby was born Saturday in Wuhan and confirmed positive 36 hours after birth, authorities said. But precisely how the child became infected was unclear.
Zeng Lingkong, director of neonatal diseases at Wuhan Children’s Hospital, told Chinese TV that other infected mothers have given birth to babies who tested negative, so it is not known if the virus can be transmitted in the womb.
Meanwhile, 10 passengers confirmed to have the virus were escorted off the cruise ship Diamond Princess quarantined at the port of Yokohama near Tokyo, after 10 others were taken off the previous day. Those taken to hospitals Thursday were mostly in their 60s and 70s.
Another cruise ship is quarantined at a port in Hong Kong.