China confirms human transmission of virus
BEIJING – The head of a Chinese government team said Monday that human-to-human transmission was 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 reported. Some medical workers tested positive for the virus, according to the English-language China Daily newspaper.
Authorities announced a sharp increase 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.”
The spread of the viral pneumonia comes as the country enters its busiest travel period, when millions board trains and planes for the Lunar New Year holidays. The outbreak may have started late last month when people picked it up at a market in Wuhan in central China.
Wuhan health authorities said Monday that an additional 136 cases have been confirmed in the city, raising the total to 198. Three people have died.
Authorities announced cases in other Chinese cities for the first time.
Five people in Beijing and 14 in Guangdong have been diagnosed with the coronavirus, CCTV reported Monday evening. A total of seven suspected cases have been found in other parts of the country, including in Sichuan and Yunnan provinces and in Shanghai.
Zhong said the two people in Guangdong had not been to Wuhan but became ill after family members returned
from the city, the China Daily said.
The outbreak has put other countries on alert. Authorities in Thailand and in Japan identified at least three cases, all involving travel from China.
South Korea reported its first case Monday when a 35-year-old Chinese woman from Wuhan tested positive for the coronavirus one day after arriving at Seoul’s Incheon airport. The woman was isolated at a state-run hospital in Incheon city, the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.
At least a half-dozen countries in Asia and three U.S. airports started screening airline passengers from central China.
People in protective suits checked the temperatures of plane passengers arriving in Macao from Wuhan.
Many of the initial cases of the coronavirus were linked to a seafood market in Wuhan, which was closed as authorities investigated.
Since hundreds of people who came into close contact with diagnosed patients have not gotten sick, the municipal health commission maintained that the virus is not easily transmitted between humans.
China’s National Health Commission said experts judged the outbreak to be “preventable and controllable.”
“However, the source of the new type of coronavirus has not been found, we do not fully understand how the virus is transmitted, and changes in the virus still need to be closely monitored,” the commission said in a statement Sunday.