China isolates 5 cities to fight virus
Lockdowns affect over 22 million; student at Texas A&M may have it
BEIJING — Chinese authorities Thursday moved to lock down at least five cities with a combined population of more than 22 million — more people than New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago put together — in an unprecedented effort to contain the deadly new virus that has sickened hundreds of people and spread to other parts of the world.
On Thursday, the first suspected case in Texas was announced: a Texas A&M student who had traveled in the last two weeks to Wuhan, China, the district where the virus originated. The student went to a hospital emergency department in Bryan-College Station with mild symptoms Wednesday evening, according to the Brazos County health district.
The student is in isolation at home, not hospitalized.
“He presented at the ER out of concern because he’d been in Wuhan, not because of the severity of his symptoms,” said Dr. Eric Wilke, health authority for the Brazos County health district. “He’s doing well.”
Wilke said the viral samples taken
from the student were sent to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, which should have results within 24 hours of receiving them. He said the CDC should receive the samples no later than Friday.
At least 25 people have died in the outbreak, according to China’s National Health Commission, all of them in and around Wuhan. Some 830 people have been infected, the vast majority in Wuhan, and many countries have begun screening travelers from China for symptoms of the virus, which can cause fever, coughing, trouble breathing and pneumonia.
The train station and airport in Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak, were shut down, and ferry, subway and bus service was halted. Normally bustling streets, shopping malls, restaurants and other public spaces in the city of 11 million were eerily quiet. Police checked all incoming vehicles but did not close off the roads.
Authorities announced similar measures would take effect Friday in the nearby cities of Huanggang, Ezhou, Zhijiang and Chibi, which are together home to more than 9 million residents, and Xiantao and Qianjiang, with large rural populations.
The CDC, which Tuesday confirmed the nation’s first case, a man in his 30s in Washington state, is screening travelers from Wuhan at airports in Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York as part of early efforts to prevent the virus’s spread to the U.S.
George Bush Intercontinental Airport tweeted earlier this week that federal agencies so far have seen no need to screen passengers at Houston airports for signs of the virus, and a spokesman said Thursday that nothing has changed since then, probably because the case in Brazos County is only suspected at this point.
But one Houston expert said he’d think any international airport taking passengers from China would want to screen for the virus.
“Because people got out of Wuhan before the quarantine, there have been cases in other parts of China,” said Peter Hotez, director of the Center for Vaccine Development at Texas Children’s Hospital. “There have been cases in Hong Kong, Shanghai and Beijing, for example, and the chances are good they’ll be seeing it in other Chinese cities too.”
Bush Airport has some direct flights to and from China but none with Wuhan.
It is unclear what airport the Texas A&M student traveled through. Wilke said the health department doesn’t have that information yet, and the Bush airport spokesman said there is no indication the student traveled through Houston.
Wilke said Brazos County officials are working on the assumption the student had been in classes and have begun taking steps to identify potential contacts, though they are awaiting the CDC results to see if they need to step up the effort. He said the risk to the campus community was low because the student did not have symptoms until Wednesday evening.
On Thursday, Bush Airport tweeted that the Transportation Security Administration is posting health alert flyers at all their checkpoints and at the Air China ticket counter. The flyers advise travelers from Wuhan to call a doctor and tell them they were in the district if they become sick within weeks of leaving.
The World Health Organization decided against declaring the outbreak a global emergency for now. Such a declaration can bring 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.”
Chinese officials have not said how long the shutdowns will last. While sweeping measures are typical of China’s 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, 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.”
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 Japan, South Korea and Thailand in addition to the U.S.
Singapore, Vietnam and Hong Kong reported their first cases Thursday.
Most of the illnesses outside China involve people who were from Wuhan or had recently traveled there.
On Thursday, in what experts described as a somewhat reassuring sign, Chinese authorities released details about 18 of the people who had died, showing that the disease had so far largely killed older men, many with underlying health problems.
Local authorities in Wuhan demanded all residents wear masks in public places. Police, SWAT teams and paramilitary troops guarded Wuhan’s train station.
Anxiety and anger prevailed as worried residents crowded into hospitals and teams of medical workers in hazmat suits sought to identify the infected.
“They can’t take proper care of all the people here,” said Sun Ansheng, a man in his 50s who was waiting outside a hospital while his wife was tested for the coronavirus.
“The city government told us there was a virus, but they didn’t explain enough what we should do,” Sun said. “They left it sounding too minor. Now look.”
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.
Analysts predicted cases will continue to multiply..
“Even if (cases) are in the thousands, this would not surprise us,” 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. It spread sparingly in 2012.