VIRUS SPREADS to more countries.
Outbreak shows signs of stabilizing at Chinese epicenter
SEOUL, South Korea — Health officials around the world Monday moved to limit the spread of an outbreak that showed signs of stabilizing at its Chinese epicenter but posed new threats far beyond.
In Italy, authorities set up roadblocks, called off soccer matches and shuttered sites including the famed La Scala opera house. In Iran, the government said 12 people had died nationwide, while five neighboring countries — Iraq, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman and Afghanistan — reported their first cases of the virus, with all those infected having links to Iran.
Across the world, stock markets and futures dipped on fears of a global slowdown because of the virus spread, with the Dow losing more than 1,000 points — 3.56% — for the day.
The number of people sickened by the coronavirus topped 79,000 globally. China reported 508 new cases of the illness today, raising the mainland’s total to 77,658. It also announced 71 new deaths for a total of 2,663.
“The past few weeks has demonstrated just how quickly a new virus can spread around the world and cause widespread fear and disruption,” said the head of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
“Does this virus have pandemic potential? Absolutely, yes,” Tedros said, but “for the moment we’re not witnessing the uncontained global spread of this virus.”
“I have spoken consistently about the need for facts, not fear. Using the word pandemic now does not fit the facts, but it may certainly cause fear,” Tedros said, speaking in Geneva.
He said a WHO expert team in China believes the virus plateaued there between Jan. 23 and Feb. 2 and has declined since. The team also said the fatality rate in China was between 2% and 4% in Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak, and 0.7% outside Wuhan.
The White House is readying an urgent budget request to address the virus. The request is still being developed but is likely to come this week, a senior administration official confirmed Monday. The Department of Health and Human Services has already tapped into an emergency infectious disease rapid response fund and is seeking to transfer more than $130 million from other HHS accounts to combat the virus but is pressing for more.
“We need some funding here to make sure that we protect all Americans,” Deputy White House Press Secretary Hogan Gidley said on Fox News. “We need to combat this, we need to make sure our people are safe, and the president is always going to take action to do that.”
Senators returning to Washington after a weeklong recess will receive a classified briefing today on the government’s coronavirus response, a Senate aide said.
Among the needs is funding to reimburse the Pentagon, which is housing evacuees from China — who are required to undergo 14-day quarantines — at several military bases in California.
Democrats controlling the House wrote HHS Secretary Alex Azar this month to request funds to help speed development of a coronavirus vaccine, expand laboratory capacity, and beef up screening efforts at U.S. entry points. Azar is slated to testify before the Senate Appropriations Committee today, and the U.S. response to the outbreak is sure to be a major topic.
The White House budget office, led by Russell Vought, is working with HHS to shape the request, with the agency seeking more than the White House is likely to approve. There is a receptive audience for the request on Capitol Hill, though standalone emergency spending bills can be tricky to pass since they are invariably a target for lawmakers seeking add-ons.
SPIKE IN IRAN
Clusters of the virus continued to emerge outside China, including in Qom, an Iranian city where the country’s semiofficial ILNA news agency cited a lawmaker as reporting a staggering 50 people had died of covid-19, the disease caused by the virus. The country’s Health Ministry rejected that, insisting the death toll remained at 12, with total infections numbering 61.
The conflicting reports raised questions about the Iranian government’s transparency concerning the scale of the outbreak. But even with the lower toll, the number of deaths compared to the number of confirmed infections from the virus is higher in Iran than in any other country, including China and South Korea, where the outbreak is far more widespread.
Asked about the spike in cases in Iran, WHO’s emergencies program director, Michael Ryan, cautioned that in the first wave of infections reported from a country, only the deaths may be being picked up and therefore be over-represented. “The virus may have been there for longer than we had previously suspected,” he said.
Ryan said a WHO team would be arriving in Iran today.
“What we don’t understand yet in covid-19 are the absolute transmission dynamics,” Ryan said, noting that in China there’s been a significant drop in cases. “That goes against the logic of pandemic.”
Authorities in Iran closed schools across much of the country for a second day Monday. Movie theaters and other venues were shuttered through at least Friday, and daily sanitizing of public buses and the Tehran metro, which is used by some 3 million people, was begun.
Recognition grew that the virus was no longer stemming only from contact with infected people in China.
“Many different countries around the world may be sources of covid-19 infections,” said Mark Woolhouse, a professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh. “This makes it much harder for any one country to detect and contain.”
In South Korea, President Moon Jae-in placed the country under a red alert, the highest level, allowing for “unprecedented, powerful steps” to stem the crisis.
Beyond expanding a delay to the start of the school year from the hardest-hit area of Daegu nationwide, though, it remains to be seen how far the government will go. A Chinese-style lockdown of Daegu — a city of 2.5 million people that is the country’s fourth-largest — appeared unlikely, even as signs of the response to a broadening problem could be seen nearly everywhere in the nation.
Health workers said they planned to test every citizen in Daegu who showed coldlike symptoms, estimating that around 28,000 people would be targeted.
In Italy, where 229 people have tested positive for the virus and seven have died, police manned checkpoints around a dozen quarantined northern towns as worries grew across the continent.
Austria temporarily halted rail traffic across its border with Italy. Slovenia and Croatia, popular getaways for Italians, were holding crisis meetings. Schools were closed, theater performances were canceled and even Carnival celebrations in Venice were called off.
It was a sign of how quickly circumstances could change in the widening covid-19 scare. Italy had imposed more stringent measures than other European countries after the outbreak began, barring flights beginning Jan. 31 to and from China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau.
Until last week, Italy had reported just three cases of infection.
“These rapid developments over the weekend have shown how quickly this situation can change,” the health commissioner for the European Union, Stella Kyriakides, said in Brussels. “We need to take this situation of course very seriously, but we must not give in to panic, and, even more importantly, to disinformation.”