Coronavirus hot spots flare up far from Wuhan, China
HONG KONG — An apartment building in Hong Kong, its units linked by pipes. A department store in the eastern Chinese city of Tianjin, where more than 11,000 shoppers and employees mingled. A ski chalet in France, home base for a group of British citizens on vacation.
These sites, scattered around the world, have become linked by a grim commonality: They are places where pockets of new coronavirus cases have emerged in recent days, raising fears about the virus’ ability to spread quickly and far beyond its origins in central China.
Since the dangerous outbreak emerged in late December, the vast majority of cases have been concentrated in Wuhan, the city where the new virus — renamed COVID-19 by the World Health Organization on Tuesday — was first reported. The authorities there and in the surrounding province have sealed off tens of millions of people in a desperate attempt at containment.
But as the outbreak’s toll has mushroomed — it has claimed more than 1,000 lives in China and sickened more than 43,000 — it has become clear how easily the virus can be transmitted and how hard it may be to contain, even in communities around the world that are far removed from Wuhan. Many people infected had not even been there.
In Tianjin, the authorities traced one-third of cases in the city to a single department store and ordered more than 10,000 people into quarantine.
In Hong Kong on Tuesday, dozens of residents were evacuated from their apartment building overnight, as two people living 10 floors apart were found to be infected with the coronavirus. Officials said an unsealed pipe might be to blame.
And in Britain on Tuesday, a businessman who is believed to be the source of 10 other cases in Britain and France said he showed no symptoms before testing positive.
The new coronavirus, though most serious in China, “holds a very grave threat for the rest of the world,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO’s director general, said at a forum in Geneva.
As the outbreak’s health implications have mounted, so has its political toll: It is already one of the most significant crises for the central government in decades. China’s ruling Communist Party dismissed two health officials in Hubei, the province at the center of the epidemic, and replaced them with a leader sent from Beijing. They were the first senior officials to be punished for the government’s handling of the outbreak.
At a news conference Tuesday,
Wu Zunyou, the chief epidemiologist of China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention, highlighted the role of clusters, defined as two or more infections within a relatively small area, in accelerating the disease’s spread. He said there had been nearly 1,000 clusters in China, with 83 percent occurring within families. But schools, factories, shopping centers and medical facilities also contributed to the spread, he said.
In Tianjin, more than 600 miles from Wuhan, officials have taken drastic steps to contain a cluster of cases linked to the department store in the district of Baodi.
At least 33 of the city’s 102 confirmed patients worked or shopped at the department store, or had close contact with employees or customers, according to local health authorities. Of those patients, many had no history of travel to Wuhan.
In response, officials said people who had visited the store in late January would be required to quarantine themselves at home. They said they had already tracked down around 11,700 employees and shoppers but expected that number to rise.
The case of the French chalet makes clear just how rapidly the virus can leap from person to person, even after global awareness of the outbreak has spread.
The infections there are believed to have roots in a conference in Singapore last month, which a British man, Steve Walsh, attended before flying to Geneva, according to French authorities and Walsh, who publicly identified himself on Tuesday. While there, Walsh is believed to have been exposed to the coronavirus, though he did not immediately show symptoms.
From Singapore, Walsh traveled to the chalet in the French Alpine village of Les ContaminesMontjoie, where he stayed with a group of other Britons. Then he went home to southern England.
Soon after his return, he was diagnosed with the virus. Then, five of the other Britons at the ski resort, who are still in France, tested positive for the virus, according to French authorities.
On Monday, British authorities announced four more people in Britain — including two health care workers — had been diagnosed with the virus, doubling the number of cases in the country. All the new cases were linked to the chalet cluster, officials said.