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You are here: Home / Economics / C.R.E.A.M. / The ‘Novel Coronovirus’ Update, Monday / Tuesday

The ‘Novel Coronovirus’ Update, Monday / Tuesday

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From the Washington Post:

BEIJING — As officials grow increasingly fearful about their ability to contain the fast-spreading outbreak of a novel coronavirus, this metropolis recorded its first death on Monday, hundreds of foreign nationals prepared to flee the country, and the U.S. government warned Americans to avoid all nonessential travel to China and planned to boost airport staff to screen nearly all passengers from there.

In a rare public mea culpa, a Chinese official said Monday that the government had mishandled the early stages of the crisis, which has claimed at least 100 lives and infected more than 4,400 people. Wuhan Mayor Zhou Xianwang, speaking with Chinese state broadcaster CCTV, said his city did not release “timely and satisfactory” information at the start of the epidemic, and he appeared to blame higher-ups in his chain of command…

The mayor said 5 million people have already left his city, some before and some after the official quarantine. Meanwhile, more than 700 miles away, Beijing recorded its first death from the outbreak, according to the city’s health commission. A 50-year-old man who visited Wuhan on Jan. 8 developed a fever when he returned home a week later and died Monday — one of the pathogen’s younger victims. Seven other cases of illness in Beijing have been confirmed so far.

Late Monday, a top U.S. health official criticized Chinese authorities for not inviting U.S. and other international investigative agencies to join them in researching the new virus. While China has been more transparent than it was during the 2003 SARS outbreak, U.S. officials are still getting their information through press briefings rather than from direct transfer of scientific data, said Anthony S. Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases….

Amid growing alarm about the disease’s fast spread, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is boosting staffing at 20 U.S. airports that have quarantine facilities. Vice President Pence said Monday that those airports receive 90 percent of airline passengers from China. Previously, passengers from Hubei province were screened and tested at five airports if they showed signs of fever or respiratory illness or have been in contact with a sick person, the CDC said. The expanded effort will take effect in coming days….

Global markets took a sharp downturn Monday as investors grew increasingly anxious about the swift spread of the coronavirus beyond China. The Dow Jones industrial average plunged 454 points, or about 1.6 percent. The Standard & Poor’s 500 and Nasdaq indexes were also down 1.6 percent and 1.9 percent, respectively…

IIRC, that’s about the same Dow Jones drop as one of the Oval Office Occupant’s more incendiary trade tweets, so not too alarming, just yet.


Reader Interactions

20Comments

  3. 3.

    Mary G

    @frosty: Ditto. You are the best, AL. Kind of freaky that they changed the destination from SFO to Ontario, a much smaller regional airport.

  4. 4.

    Mary G

    @Mary G: Ontario is an international airport and China Air flies into there regularly, so not that freaky after all. I’ve only gone to Vegas from there.

  5. 5.

    Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes

    Wife has a couple of customers in Beijing right now – they were en route when all tourist attractions and festivals got shut down.

    They were visiting their daughter (a State Dept. employee), and are cutting their visit short by a week. They gotta be bored out of their minds.

  7. 7.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Mary G: It makes sense to send them to a smaller airport if they can. Easier to take the time to properly screen everyone without inconveniencing other travelers.

  8. 8.

    Rusty

    These accelerations in the numbers on the 24 press briefing cycle, for example deaths 56 two days ago, 81 yesterday now 104, are they actual increases or are they catching up to reality?  Either is worrying.

  9. 9.

    Barbara

    @Rusty: I am not here to reassure anyone but I can only imagine how hard it is to ensure the timely relay of accurate information when health care workers on the ground are working overtime to care for people streaming in to ERs in China.  I assume that information caught up with reality.

  10. 10.

    chris

    Thanks, AL, for the morning update.

    If anyone is wondering the Gofundme is being run by people from Dalhousie U. medical school. You may not have heard of it but I’m quite happy that my doctor is a graduate.

  11. 11.

    Cheryl Rofer

    Anne, thanks for the updates. I mostly skim the tweets you post, but they seem to be from the more reliable reports. There are a lot of rumors around.

    @Rusty: As more testing is done, more cases will be found, including those that have less severe symptoms. That seems to account for the rapid increases so far.

    The death rate seems to be low, but we’re in early times, with regard both to the statistics collected and the possible long-range effects of the virus.

    Jane Lytvynenko is collecting disinformation that is circulating and updating her collection. I haven’t seen much of it in my Twitter feed, but some gets through.

  12. 12.

    EmbraceYourInnerCrone

    I’ve been reading The Straits Times   website (Singapore) and the South China Morning Post website (Hong Kong) under the theory that the newspapers closer to mainland China probably have more information than what gets filtered through the New York Times and Washington Post. 

    And there are local stories about the situation that won’t get published in Western newspapers , most likely.  For instance: Quarantine will apply to about 2000 people

    Meanwhile I wish my coworkers had gotten the flu shot…my office sounds like a TB ward with all the coughing/sneezing people.

  14. 14.

    Cervantes

    There is no basis for the claim by this Harden guy that the virus is “increasingly virulent.” In fact all the evidence is that it causes either no symptoms or mild disease in the vast majority of infected people. Basically, it’s a common cold virus. Colds sometimes go to pneumonia in people who are already debilitated. Whether this virus is more virulent than the average cold virus has yet to be determined but this whole thing is being overhyped, I would say.

  17. 17.

    JCJ

    @EmbraceYourInnerCrone:

    I have been checking the websites for the Bangkok Post as well as another English language newspaper in Thailand called The Nation for the same reason as you but also because I am in Bangkok now visiting my mother in law.   So far there have been 14 cases in Thailand, mostly tourists from the area of Wuhan.

  18. 18.

    EmbraceYourInnerCrone

    @Emma: Thank you, I did not know that.  I sometimes go looking for news papers outside the U.S. ones just to get a different view point on current events, partly because the U.S. ones can be very myopic at times. But it’s always a crap shoot as you never know who owns the paper/website and how they are actually getting their stories.

  19. 19.

    greenergood

    @Fair Economist: Thank you for this site –  I will keep watching. My fear is that if the coronavirus takes any kind of hold in Xinjiang it will be ignored and swept under the rug,  because the rest of China is going to have enough of a problem dealing with this, because Xinjiang is far away from major conurbations, because it will be easy to shut down not just the Internet, but any communications, and because the people in the camps are dispensible, being Muslim. Also, it looks like the virus really goes after people who are in poor health or old, and many people in the camps are in very poor health, with very unsanitary living conditions.

  20. 20.

    JustRuss

    @OzarkHillbilly: Also, in my very limited experience, Ontario is a lot less busy than SF. If they need to detain people or route in some special flights, they’ll have a much easier time there.

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