- Coronavirus outbreak worsens in China as the WHO chief sis slated to visit.
- The Chinese Premier visits the infected city Wuhan as death toll rises to 81
- China extends the new year holiday week to February to contain disease spread.
- Top Chinese Health Official says that the virus spreads before showing symptoms.
- Debates on incubation period continues as WHO estimate says 10 days in the incubation period
- WHO seeks more data before declaring this a global health emergency.
- CDC closely following the situation and may seek to collaborate in the coming days.
- US Health officials say more data required from China to validate virus asymptomatic claims.
- US re-evaluating strategy based on the virus spread claim
According to a CNBC report,Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the World Health Organization’s director general, is traveling to Beijing, China, to meet with government and health officials on the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak.
Why WHO Visit?
The WHO has so far declined to declare the dangerous respiratory disease a global health emergency, despite the spread of the infection from China to at least 10 other countries and the increasing death toll.
“I am on my way to Beijing, [China] to meet with the Government & health experts supporting the [coronavirus] response. My [WHO] colleagues & I would like to understand the latest developments & strengthen our partnership with [China] in providing further protection against the outbreak,” Ghebreyesus wrote in a Twitter post Sunday.
“We are working 24/7 to support [China] & its people during this difficult time & remain in close contact with affected countries, with our regional & country offices deeply involved. [WHO] is updating all countries on the situation & providing specific guidance on what to do to respond,” he wrote.
The mayor of Wuhan said on Sunday that there could be about 1,000 more confirmed cases of the virus in the city. About 5 million people left Wuhan before travel was restricted, and nine million people are currently living there.
Death Toll Rises, China Extends Holiday
Meanwhile, Reuters reports that the death toll from the coronavirus outbreak in China rose to 81 on Monday, as the government extended the Lunar New Year holiday and more big businesses shut down or told staff to work from home in an effort to curb the spread.
- More than 2,700 people in China are now said to have been infected by the fast-spreading coronavirus while more countries have reported their first confirmed cases, reported CNBC on Sunday.
- Chinese officials said, as of the end of Sunday, there are 2,744 confirmed cases, including 461 people in critical condition.
- The government is extending the week-long Lunar New Year holiday by three days to Feb. 2, in a bid to slow the spread of the virus. The Lunar New Year is usually a time for travel by millions, but many have had to cancel plans because of curbs over the virus.
Chinese Premier Visits Wuhan
Chinese Premier Li Keqiang visited the central city of Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak, as the government sought to signal it was responding seriously.
Li is the most senior leader to visit Wuhan since the outbreak began. Clad in a blue protective suit and mask, he inspected efforts to contain the epidemic and spoke to patients and medical staff, the government said.
Chinese Companies Affected
Some of China’s biggest companies have been affected, with hotpot restaurant chain Haidilao International Holding shutting branches nationwide from Sunday until Friday.
Gaming giant Tencent Holdings Ltd advised staff to work from home until Feb. 7, and e-commerce firm Alibaba removed vendors’ offers of overpriced face masks from its online Taobao marketplace as prices surged.
Latest Developments
- Asian shares tumbled, with Japan’s Nikkei average sliding 2.0%, its biggest one-day fall in five months, as investors grew increasingly anxious. Demand spiked for safe-haven assets such as the Japanese yen and Treasury notes.
- The total number of confirmed cases in China rose about 30% to 2,744, with about half in Hubei province, whose capital is Wuhan.
- The nearby gambling hub of Macau, which has had at least one case of the flu-like virus, imposed a similar ban on those arriving from Hubei, unless they can prove they are virus-free.
- The city of Haikou on Hainan island in southern China said tourists from Hubei would be quarantined for 14 days.
“Hubei people are getting discriminated against,” a Wuhan resident complained on the Weibo social media platform.
The number of deaths from the virus in Hubei climbed to 76 from 56, health officials said, with five deaths elsewhere in China.
The Spread of the Virus
While a small number of cases have been confirmed in more than 10 countries, linked to people who traveled from Wuhan, no deaths have been reported elsewhere. (Graphic: Number of confirmed cases rockets – here)
Australia confirmed its fifth case on Monday involving a woman on the last flight out of Wuhan to Sydney before China’s travel ban.
Health Minister Greg Hunt told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) authorities aimed to get about 100 Australian children and young people out of Wuhan.
One father of two, Nathan Wang, told the ABC his wife was stuck in Wuhan with the children.
“We absolutely want the children to come back, because hospitals in Wuhan are overwhelmed,” he said.
Australia, France, Italy, Japan and the United States have all said they are working to evacuate citizens from Wuhan.
The Infected City
- Wuhan is already in virtual lockdown and severe limits on movement are in place in several other Chinese cities.
- The city of 11 million clamped down further on Monday, suspending visa and passport services until Thursday.
- Images from Wuhan showing hospital corridors packed with people seeking treatment have circulated on social media, along with complaints of soaring prices for essentials such as vegetables.
- Chinese leaders have urged transparency in the crisis, after public trust was eroded by the cover-up of the spread of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), a coronavirus that originated in China and killed nearly 800 people globally in 2002 and 2003.
- China stepped up efforts to increase medical supplies to Wuhan that includes transferring 14,000 protective suits and 110,000 pairs of gloves from the central medical reserves, according to the State Council.
- Emergency supplies of 3 million masks, 100,000 protective suits and 2,180 pairs of goggles were also made available.
- More than 1,600 medical staff are said to be sent to the Hubei province to assist in containing the virus.
- The central government previously said it allocated 1 billion yuan ($145 million) to support the province — Wuhan is building a 1,000-bed hospital to treat the infected and plans to have the facility operational by the end of the week.
- Authorities also temporarily banned the trade of wild animals in China on Sunday, responding to the outbreak as some consider the virus to have originated in a type of wild animal sold and consumed as food in Wuhan, the Associated Press reported.
- Wuhan’s mayor said on Sunday that there could be about 1,000 more confirmed cases of the virus in the city.
- About 5 million people left Wuhan before travel was restricted, and nine million people are currently living there.
INCUBATION Period
Much is not known about the newly identified coronavirus, including how easily it spreads and just how dangerous it is. It can cause pneumonia, which has been deadly in some cases.
National Health Commission Minister Ma Xiaowei said on Sunday the incubation period could range from one to 14 days, and the virus was infectious during incubation, unlike SARS.
That compares with a World Health Organization (WHO) estimate of two to 10 days for the incubation period.
“Understanding the time when infected patients may transmit the virus to others is critical for control efforts,” the WHO said.
The virus is believed to have originated late last year in a Wuhan market illegally selling wildlife. It has spread to other cities, including Beijing and Shanghai, as well as more than 10 countries including France, Japan and the United States.
Infected People To Increase?
The head of China’s National Health Commission, Ma Xiaowei, said on Sunday that infected people without symptoms could still spread the disease to others. The virus’s incubation period, which is contagious, is roughly 10 to 14 days, he said.
“The epidemic has entered a more serious and complex period,” he said, adding that the rate of the epidemic is accelerating and will continue to do so.
WHO Seeks More Data
The WHO said it needs more data before declaring the virus, which is spreading through human-to-human contact, a global health emergency. “Make no mistake: This is an emergency in China,” Ghebreyesus said on Thursday. “But it has not yet become a global health emergency. It may yet become one.”
Virus Spreads Quicker Than Symptoms
Meanwhile, CNN reports that China’s health minister Ma Xiaowei made a startling statement Sunday about the Wuhan coronavirus:
He said people can spread it before they become symptomatic.
“This is a game changer,” said Dr. William Schaffner, a longtime adviser to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
It’s much harder to contain a virus — to track down a patient’s contacts and quarantine them immediately — if the patient was spreading the disease for days or weeks before they even realized they had it.
What does this mean?
“It means the infection is much more contagious than we originally thought,“ said Schaffner, an infectious disease specialist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. “This is worse than we anticipated.”
Ma didn’t explain why he thinks the virus can be spread before someone has symptoms. If the Chinese health minister is right — and there are those who doubt him — that means the five confirmed cases in the United States might have been infectious while traveling from Wuhan to Arizona, California, Illinois and Washington state, even if they had no symptoms at the time.
CDC on America Disease Risk
On Sunday, Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said the risk to the American public for contracting this virus continues to be low.
“We at CDC don’t have clear evidence that patients are infectious before symptom onset, but we are actively investigating that possibility,” Messonnier said.“We need to be preparing as if this is a pandemic, but I continue to hope that it is not,” she added.
‘We’re going to have to reevaluate our strategy’
US health officials believe the Wuhan virus has an incubation period of about two weeks, CDC officials said Friday during a media briefing.
American trapped at the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak says she’s angry and scared
“Based on what we know now about this virus, our concern for transmission before symptoms develop is low, so that is reassuring,” Dr. Jennifer Layden, an epidemiologist with the Illinois Department of Health, said at the Friday briefing. The update on Sunday from the Chinese health minister should encourage health officials to change that thinking, some infectious disease experts told CNN.
Re-evaluating Strategy
“Assuming that Ma is correct, we’re going to have to re-evaluate our strategy, that’s for sure,” Schaffner said.
Dr. Paul Offit, another longtime CDC adviser, said given Ma’s news, he thinks health officials should alert people on the flights that the three US patients took from Wuhan that they might have traveled with someone who was infectious.“I think the conservative thing to do would be to cast a wider net,” he said. NIH doctor wants US to inspect Chinese data
The United States’ top infectious disease doctor wants a team of CDC disease detectives to go to China and check on these crucial questions about how the Wuhan coronavirus is spreading. But there’s something stopping them: China first has to invite the CDC.
“Up to now, to my knowledge, we have not been invited,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the US National Institutes of Health, said Sunday.
NIH and CDC are separate divisions of the US Department of Health and Human Services.
The implications of Ma’s statement that the coronavirus is transmissible before symptoms are so important “that in my mind it’s absolutely critical that we ourselves see the data, because what goes on over there has implications for what happens here,” Fauci said.
He added that to his knowledge, the Chinese did not tell US health authorities that the virus could spread before someone is symptomatic, a crucial aspect of any disease investigation. He said he learned about it after reading a CNN reporter’s email.
CDC Engagement in the Coming Days?
Fauci said that CDC disease detectives would need to see precisely how Chinese health authorities have gathered their data and how they came to their conclusion.
“To my knowledge, we have not seen the precise minute, granular data and how they collected it,” he said. “We need to get to the real bottom line of how they collected their data and see if it’s valid.”
“The Chinese have good people. I don’t want to impugn their capabilities,” Fauci added. “But when it’s something as important as this, our people who are trained epidemiologists need to go over their data and the best way to do that is go there and see how they’re collecting it.”
CDC’s Messonnier said Sunday the CDC has staff in China, but the team is not directly involved in the Wuhan coronavirus response. The agency hopes to have “additional engagement” on the outbreak in China in the coming days, she said.
Are Chinese officials right?
Some experts are skeptical because of the lack of data from China.
“I seriously doubt that the Chinese public officials have any data supporting this statement,” said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. “I know of no evidence in 17 years of working with coronaviruses — SARS and MERS — where anyone has been found to be infectious during their incubation period.”
Severe acute respiratory syndrome and Middle East respiratory syndrome are both caused by coronaviruses. While each has killed hundreds of people worldwide, together they amounted to only a handful of cases and no deaths in the United States.
Offit, on the other hand, said it wouldn’t surprise him if the Chinese health minister is right and the Wuhan coronavirus can be spread while people are asymptomatic. Measles, mumps, rubella and chicken pox all spread that way, he said.
Despite that, he said he’s optimistic that the US can control the outbreak before it gets out of hand, as it has in China. That’s because the spread of the outbreak doesn’t just rely on the time period of contagiousness. It also relies on how easily the virus spreads. Some viruses,such as measles, spread easily even to people on the other side of a room. Other viruses spread only with much closer contact.
“My gut says we’re going to be able to contain this real quick — we’re going to be able to put a moat around this fire,” said Offit, a pediatric infectious disease expert at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. “I think this is going to be much more like SARS or MERS than the movie ‘Contagion.’ “
“But then,” the Philadelphia-based doctor said, “I’m an Eagles fan, so I tend to be optimistic about things.”
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