Desperate to stop new virus’ spread, countries limit travel

NEW YORK >> Health officials in the U.S. warned Tuesday that the fast-spreading coronavirus is certain to reach the country at some point, even as their counterparts in Europe and Asia scrambled to contain new outbreaks of the illness.

“It’s not so much a question of if this will happen anymore, but rather more a question of exactly when this will happen — and how many people in this country will have severe illness,” Dr. Nancy Messonnier of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a call with reporters.

The CDC’s call for Americans to be prepared added new urgency to response efforts that, until this week, focused on a disease largely confined to China, where it apparently originated, and neighboring countries.

In other developments Tuesday:

• New clusters of the illness popped up far from China, causing increased concerns for officials in some of the wealthiest nations in Europe and Asia, as well as in countries with far fewer resources. But many remained uncertain about how best to contain it.

The new outbreaks were reported in places as farflung as Italy and Iran, France and Algeria, and Spain’s Canary Islands. The tiny Persian Gulf nation of Bahrain said it had 17 cases, including a school bus driver who had transported students as recently as Sunday.

In Iran, the head of the country’s virus task force, who just a day earlier had urged the public not to overreact about the spread of the disease, tested positive himself. The official, Iraj Harirchi, posted a new video online, promising authorities would bring the virus under control within weeks.

But a ministry spokesman, Kianoush Jahanpour, said it could take at least until the Persian New Year’s holiday on March 20, or as long as late April, to contain the disease. “We don’t expect a miracle in the short term,” he said.

• Officials in South Korea said they were racing to contain an outbreak that has grown to nearly 1,000 cases.

“It’s a matter of speed and time: We must create a clear turning point within this week,” President Moon Jae-in said. In the largest cluster, in the city of Daegu and nearby towns, many shops remained closed Tuesday and activity in some neighborhoods came to a near standstill.

On a U.S. military base in Daegu, the center of infections in South Korea, officials said a 61-year-old widow of a U.S. service member had also been infected. It was the first known case among people related to the thousands of U.S. troops stationed in the country.

• The virus’ toll continued to mount, even as Chinese officials reported a slowing in the number of new cases. As of Tuesday, the spread of the illness had sickened some 80,000 people worldwide and caused about 2,700 deaths.

The vast majority of those infections remain in China, which reported 508 new cases and another 71 deaths, 68 of them in the central city of Wuhan, where the epidemic was first detected in December.