Chinese lock down 8 cities to curb deadly virus’s spread
BEIJING — China instituted unprecedented, open-ended lockdowns encompassing more than 25 million people today to try to contain a deadly new virus that has sickened hundreds, even though the measures’ potential for success is uncertain.
At least eight cities have been shut down — Wuhan, Ezhou, Huanggang, Chibi,
Qianjiang, Xiantao, Zhijiang and Jinmen — all in central China’s Hubei province, where the illness has been concentrated.
In Wuhan, where the lockdown began early Thursday, normally bustling streets, malls and other public spaces were eerily quiet. Wearing of masks was mandatory in public. The train station and airport were closed, and ferry, subway and bus service was halted. Police checked all incoming vehicles but did not close off the roads.
The five other cities under lockdown as of this morning are near Wuhan, but authorities also were taking precautions around the country. In the capital, Beijing, major public events were canceled indefinitely, including traditional temple fairs that are a staple of Lunar New Year celebrations. The Forbidden City, the palace complex in
Beijing that is now a museum, announced that on Saturday it will close indefinitely.
The number of confirmed cases of the new coronavirus rose to 830 with 25 deaths, the National Health Commission said this morning. The first death was also confirmed outside Hubei, a northern province bordering Beijing. The health commission in Hebei said an 80-year-old man died after returning from a two-month stay in Wuhan to see relatives.
The lockdowns are unmatched in size, embracing more people than New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago combined.
In Huanggang, theaters, internet cafes and other entertainment centers were also ordered closed.
Beijing authorities said they were restricting public gatherings over the Lunar New Year holiday, which officially begins today and is often celebrated with fireworks displays and popular fairs at temples.
Airports around the world, from London to Dubai to Atlanta, have put special screening measures in place to detect passengers arriving from China with symptoms of the virus, which can cause fever, coughing, trouble breathing and pneumonia.
In a post that was online for less than an hour, the Wuhan Health Commission admitted Thursday that it was struggling to respond to the outbreak. “At present, there is an obvious increase in the number of patients with fever in the city, and it is true that there are long queues and a shortage of beds in fever clinics,” the commission said.
Hospitals and charitable organizations in Wuhan put out requests for donations of medical supplies, including masks and surgical gloves. China’s finance ministry later said it was allocating $144 million to Hubei province to help it fight the outbreak.
A post from Wuhan Railway saying that 300,000 people traveled by train out of Wuhan on Wednesday, headed to every corner of the country, was also quickly deleted.
Meanwhile, the World Health Organization decided against declaring the outbreak a global emergency for now. Such a declaration can provide more money and other resources to fight a threat but can also trigger economically damaging restrictions on trade and travel in the affected countries, making the decision a politically fraught one.
The decision “should not be taken as a sign that WHO does not think the situation is serious or that we’re not taking it seriously. Nothing could be further from the truth,” WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said. “WHO is following this outbreak every minute of every day.”
The steps taken by China to shut down cities with more than 18 million people are unprecedented in public health, as countries typically shy away from such extreme measures.
Tedros said that while WHO’s role is to provide science-based recommendations, “at the end of the day, a sovereign country has the autonomy to do what it thinks is right.” However, he added that WHO hoped the actions taken by China would be “short in duration.”
Chinese officials have not said how long the shutdowns will last. While sweeping measures are typical of China’s communist government, large-scale quarantines are rare around the world, even in deadly epidemics, because of concerns about infringing on people’s liberties. And the effectiveness of such measures is unclear.
“To my knowledge, trying to contain a city of 11 million people is new to science,” said Gauden Galea, the WHO”s representative in China. “It has not been tried before as a public health measure. We cannot at this stage say it will or it will not work.”
Jonathan Ball, a professor of virology at the University of Nottingham in Britain, said the lockdowns appear to be justified scientifically.
“Until there’s a better understanding of what the situation is, I think it’s not an unreasonable thing to do,” he said. “Anything that limits people’s travels during an outbreak would obviously work.”
But Ball cautioned that any such quarantine should be strictly time-limited. He added: “You have to make sure you communicate effectively about why this is being done. Otherwise you will lose the goodwill of the people.”
During the devastating West Africa Ebola outbreak in 2014, Sierra Leone imposed a national three-day quarantine as health workers went door-to-door, searching for cases. Burial teams collecting corpses and people taking the sick to Ebola centers were the only ones allowed to move freely. Frustrated residents complained of food shortages.
In China, the illnesses from the newly identified coronavirus first appeared last month in Wuhan, an industrial and transportation hub in central China’s Hubei province. Other cases have turned up in the United States, Japan, South Korea and Thailand. Singapore, Vietnam and Hong Kong reported their first cases Thursday.
The sharp rise in illnesses comes as millions of Chinese travel for the Lunar New Year, one of the world’s largest annual migrations of people. Chinese are expected to take an estimated 3 billion trips during the 40-day spike in travel.
Most of the illnesses outside China involve people who were from Wuhan or had recently traveled there.
Images from Wuhan showed long lines and empty shelves at supermarkets, as people stocked up for what could be weeks of isolation. No restrictions were placed on trucks carrying supplies into the city, but many Chinese have strong memories of shortages in the years before the country’s recent economic boom.
Local authorities in Wuhan demanded that all residents wear masks in public places. Police, SWAT teams and paramilitary troops guarded Wuhan’s train station.
Analysts predicted that cases will continue to multiply, although the jump in numbers is also attributable in part to increased monitoring.
“Even if [cases] are in the thousands, this would not surprise us,” the WHO’s Galea said, adding, however, that the number of infected is not an indicator of the outbreak’s severity so long as the death rate remains low.
The coronavirus family includes the common cold as well as viruses that cause more serious illnesses, such as the SARS outbreak that spread from China to more than a dozen countries in 2002-03 and killed about 800 people, and Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome, or MERS, which is thought to have originated from camels.
China is keen to avoid repeating mistakes with its handling of the severe acute respiratory syndrome. For months, even after the illness had spread around the world, China parked patients in hotels and drove them around in ambulances to conceal the true number of cases and avoid WHO experts. This time, China has been credited with sharing information rapidly, and President Xi Jinping has emphasized that as a priority.
Health authorities are taking extraordinary measures to prevent the spread of the virus, placing those believed to be infected in plastic tubes and wheeled boxes, with air passed through filters.
The first cases in the Wuhan outbreak were connected to people who worked at or visited a seafood market, now closed for an investigation. Experts suspect that the virus was first transmitted from wild animals but that it may also be mutating. Mutations can make it deadlier or more contagious.
Information for this article was contributed by Ken Moritsugu, Yanan Wang, Maria Cheng, Shanshan Wang, Maria Cheng and Krista Larson of The Associated Press; and by Anna Fifield, Lena H. Sun, Wang Yuan, Liu Yang, Lyric Li, Yasmeen Abutaleb and Siobhan O’Grady of The Washington Post.