Coronavirus hits health workers
China’s factories and offices slowly creaking back into life
BEIJING — The new coronavirus has infected 1,700 Chinese health workers and killed six, authorities said on Friday, as businesses struggled to balance containment measures with a return from an extended post-holiday break.
Authorities reported 5,090 new cases in mainland China, including more than 120 deaths, taking the total number of infected to 63,851, and the number of deaths from the disease, now labelled Covid19, to 1,380.
“The duties of medical workers at the front are indeed extremely heavy; their working and resting circumstances are limited, the psychological pressures are great, and the risk of infection is high,” Zeng Yixin, vice minister of the National Health Commission, told a news conference.
China’s factories and offices are only slowly creaking back into life after Lunar New Year holidays that were extended by 10 days in the struggle to rein in the virus, which emerged in December in Wuhan, capital of the central province of Hubei.
The problem is reviving the world’s second-largest economy when a staggering 500 million people are currently affected by movement and travel restrictions to contain the new virus - 2019nCov.
The new national infection figures give no sign that the outbreak is nearing a peak, said Adam Kamradt-Scott, an infectious diseases expert at the Centre for International Security Studies at the University
of Sydney.
In cities such as Beijing, the capital, and the business hub of Shanghai, streets and subways remain largely deserted with many shops and restaurants empty or shut.
Government employee Jin Yang, 28, made it in to his Beijing office but found it “anything but normal”.
Canteen lunches are banned in favour of boxed meals eaten at desks. Meetings are held online, instead of in person. Employees must wear masks all day - and report their temperature twice a day.
Wuhan, the city of 11 million people at the centre of the outbreak, has the most acute problem - and an impressive unofficial response.
With all public transport, taxis and ride-hailing services shut down in the city, volunteer drivers are responding to requests on ad hoc messaging groups to ferry medical staff and others in vital jobs to and from work, putting their own health on the line in the process. Others work around the clock to find accommodation for medical workers in hotels that have volunteered their rooms.
Many of the drivers keep their identities secret to avoid objections from family and friends.
“Everyone in our group has such a strong sense of mission,” said 53-year-old Wuhan resident Chen Hui, who runs one of the ad hoc ride services.
But there is little sign that the tide has yet turned against a virus killing around 2% of those it infects - but able to spread much faster than other respiratory viruses that have emerged this century.
“While the Chinese authorities are doing their best to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, the fairly drastic measures they have implemented to date would appear to have been too little, too late,” Kamradt-Scott said.
WHO official Simeon Bennett
said: “We see no significant change in the trajectory of the outbreak.”
Economists polled by Reuters said China’s economic downturn would be shortlived if the outbreak was contained, but expected that this quarter would show China’s slowest growth rate since the global financial crisis.
The Chinese carmakers’ association said auto sales in China, the world’s largest market, were likely to slide more than 10 per cent in the first half of the year due to the epidemic, and Germany’s Volkswagen said its sales to China had fallen 11 per cent in January.