Tag Archives: China

Death of Chinese coronavirus doctor sparks online anger at government

Se Young Lee and Brenda Goh

BEIJING/SHANGHAI (Reuters) – A Chinese doctor reprimanded for warning against a “SARS-like” coronavirus before it was officially recognised died of the illness on Friday, triggering online expressions of anger at the government and fuelling suspicions of censorship.

The death of Li Wenliang, 34, came as Chinese President Xi Jinping told the United States that China was doing all it could to contain the virus after earlier assuring the World Health Organization (WHO) of full openness and transparency.

The death toll in mainland China reached 637 on Friday, with a total of 31,211 cases, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in Geneva, warning of a worldwide shortage of gowns, masks and other protective equipment.

“For the last two days there had been fewer reported infections in China, which is good news, but we caution against reading too much into that,” he told the WHO Executive Board.

“The numbers could go up again.”

Medical workers in protective suits attend to novel coronavirus patients inside an isolated ward at a hospital in Wuhan, Hubei province, China February 6, 2020. China Daily via REUTERS

U.S. President Donald Trump, after speaking to Xi by phone, said China was showing “great discipline” in tackling the virus.

“Nothing is easy, but he will be successful, especially as the weather starts to warm & the virus hopefully becomes weaker, and then gone,” Trump said on Twitter. “…We are working closely with China to help!”

Ophthalmologist Li was among eight people reprimanded by police in the city of Wuhan, the epicentre of the flu-like contagion in central Hubei province, for spreading “illegal and false” information.

Li’s social media warnings of a new “SARS-like” coronavirus – a reference to Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, which killed almost 800 people around the world in 2002-2003 after originating in China – angered police.

China was accused of trying to cover up SARS.

Li was forced to sign a letter on Jan. 3, saying he had “severely disrupted social order” and was threatened with charges.

A selfie of him lying on a hospital bed this week wearing an oxygen respirator and holding up his Chinese identification card was shared widely online.

“We deeply mourn the death of Wuhan doctor Li Wenliang … After all-effort rescue, Li passed away,” the ruling Communist Party’s People’s Daily said on Twitter.

Social media users called Li a hero, accusing authorities of incompetence.

“Wuhan indeed owes Li Wenliang an apology,” Hu Xijin, editor of the government-backed Global Times tabloid, said on social media. “Wuhan and Hubei officials also owe a solemn apology to the people of Hubei and this country.”

Li’s death was a “tragic reminder” of how China’s preoccupation with maintaining stability drives it to suppress vital information, Nicholas Bequelin, Southeast Asia regional director for Amnesty International said.

“China must learn the lesson from Li’s case and adopt a rights-respecting approach to combating the epidemic,” he said.

 

BATS TO HUMANS?

Some media described Li as a hero “willing to speak the truth” but there were signs that discussion of his death was being censored.

The topics “the Wuhan government owes doctor Li Wenliang an apology” and “we want free speech” briefly trended on Weibo late on Thursday, but yielded no search results on Friday.

The virus has spread around the world, with 320 cases in 27 countries and regions outside mainland China, a Reuters tally of official statements shows.

Mike Ryan, WHO’s top emergency expert, told the Executive Board in Geneva he was worried about stigma being attached to the virus amid reports of Asians being shunned in the West.

“The unnecessary, unhelpful profiling of individuals based on ethnicity is utterly and completely unacceptable and it needs to stop,” he said.

The outbreak could have spread from bats to humans through the illegal traffic of pangolins, the world’s only scaly mammals, Chinese researchers said, sparking some scepticism.

“This is not scientific evidence,” said James Wood, head of the University of Cambridge’s veterinary medicine department.

Two deaths have been reported outside mainland China, in Hong Kong and the Philippines, but how deadly and contagious the virus is remains unclear, prompting countries to quarantine hundreds of people and cut travel links with China.

There were 41 new cases among about 3,700 people quarantined in a cruise ship moored off Japan, taking the total on board to 61.

Chinese-ruled Hong Kong quarantined for a third day a cruise ship with 3,600 on board after three people who had been on the vessel proved infected.

Singapore reported three more coronavirus cases not linked to previous infections or travel to China, prompting it to raise its alert to orange, the level reached during the SARS outbreak in 2003.

China has sealed off cities, cancelled flights and closed factories, cutting supply lines to global businesses, so that Beijing resembles a ghost town.

Virus concerns swiped world markets on Friday but failed to stand in the way of the best week for stocks since June and the strongest for the dollar since August.

As Trump praised China’s discipline, the head of the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Justice, Li Fuying, told reporters that people deliberately concealing contacts or refusing to go into isolation could be punished with death.

(Reporting by Se Young Lee and Brenda Goh; Additional reporting by Ryan Woo in Beijing, Yilei Sun in Shanghai, Ismail Shakil in Bengaluru, Silvia Aloisi in Milan and Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva, Kate Kelland in London; Writing by Robert Birsel and Nick Macfie; Editing by Clarence Fernandez and Giles Elgood)

WHO says too early to say coronavirus peaking in China

GENEVA (Reuters) – The World Health Organization (WHO) said on Thursday it was too early to say that China’s coronavirus outbreak was peaking, but noted that Wednesday was the first day that the overall number of new cases in China had dropped.

Executive Director of the World Health Organisation’s emergencies program Mike Ryan, Director-General of WHO Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus and the Technical Lead for the WHO’s emergencies program Maria Van Kerkhovespeaks at a news conference on the novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) in Geneva, Switzerland February 6, 2020. REUTERS/Denis Balibouse

The death toll from the virus in mainland China jumped by 73 to 563, with more than 28,000 confirmed infections inside the world’s second-largest economy.

WHO official Mike Ryan said there had been a constant increase in cases in Hubei province, at the centre of the outbreak, but that that increase had not been seen in other provinces.

 

(Reporting by Stephanie Nebehay; writing by Nick Macfie; Editing by Toby Chopra)

U.S. and China clash at WHO over Taiwan participation

GENEVA (Reuters) – The United States urged the World Health Organization (WHO) on Thursday to “engage directly with Taiwan public health authorities” in the fight against coronavirus.

Taiwan is not a WHO member because of China’s objections. Beijing says the island is a wayward Chinese province and not a country and is adequately represented in the organisation by China.

“For the rapidly evolving coronavirus, it is a technical imperative that WHO present visible public health data on Taiwan as an affected area and engage directly with Taiwan public health authorities on actions,” Andrew Bremberg, U.S. ambassador to the U.N. in Geneva, told the WHO’s Executive Board.

China’s delegation took the floor to express its “strong dissatisfaction” that some countries had raised the issue of Taiwan’s participation during the technical meeting.

(Reporting by Stephanie Nebehay; Editing by Toby Chopra)

FBI points to China as biggest U.S. law-enforcement threat

By Mark Hosenball and David Brunnstrom

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The FBI on Thursday identified China as the biggest law enforcement threat to the United States, and its director said Beijing was seeking to steal American technology by “any means necessary.”

FBI Director Christopher Wray told a conference the bureau currently had about 1,000 investigations open into Chinese technology theft across its 56 regional offices.

FBI counterintelligence chief John Brown said the bureau arrested 24 people in 2019 in China-related cases and had already arrested 19 people in 2020.

He told the conference at Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) that the FBI believed “no country poses a greater threat than Communist China.”

Wray said the threat needed to be dealt with through action across the whole of the U.S. government.

“As I stand here talking with you today, the FBI has about 1,000 investigations involving China’s attempted theft of U.S.-based technology in all 56 of our field offices and spanning just about every industry sector,” he said.

Wray added that China was aggressively exploiting U.S. academic openness to steal technology, using “campus proxies” and establishing “institutes on our campuses.”

William Evanina, director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, told the conference China was placing particular priority on stealing U.S. aircraft and electric vehicle technology.In advance of Thursday’s event, Evanina estimated the theft of American trade secrets by China costs the United States “anywhere from $300 to $600 billion” a year.

The FBI data shows an aggressively stepped-up campaign by U.S. authorities to root out Chinese espionage operations pursuing American secrets. This has snared a growing group of Chinese government officials, business people, and academics.

In 2019 alone, public records show U.S. authorities arrested and expelled two Chinese diplomats who allegedly drove onto a military base in Virginia. They also caught and jailed former CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency officials on espionage charges linked to China.

China’s efforts to steal unclassified American technology, ranging from military secrets to medical research, have long been thought to be extensive and aggressive, but U.S. officials only launched a broad effort to stop alleged Chinese espionage in the United States in 2018.

CHINA SAYS CHARGES ‘ENTIRELY BASELESS’

The Chinese embassy in Washington rejected the U.S. allegations as “entirely baseless.”

“The people-to-people exchange between China and the US is conducive to stronger understanding between the two peoples and serves the fundamental interests of our two countries,” it said in an emailed statement.

According to CSIS, of 137 publicly reported instances of Chinese-linked espionage against the United States since 2000, 73% took place in the last decade,

The CSIS data, which excludes cases of intellectual property litigation and attempts to smuggle munitions or controlled technologies, shows that military and commercial technologies are the most common targets for theft.

In the area of medical research, of 180 investigations into misuse of National Institutes of Health funds, diversion of research intellectual property and inappropriate sharing of confidential information, more than 90% of the cases have links to China, according to an NIH spokeswoman.

One main reason Chinese espionage, including extensive hacking in cyberspace, has expanded is that “China depends on Western technology and as licit avenues are closed, they turn to espionage to get access,” said CSIS expert James Lewis.

In late January alone, federal prosecutors in Boston announced three new criminal cases involving industrial spying or stealing, including charges against a Harvard department chair.

Prosecutors said Harvard’s Charles Lieber lied to the Pentagon and the NIH about his involvement in the Thousand Talents Plan: a Chinese government program that offers mainly Chinese scientists working overseas lavish financial incentives to bring their expertise and knowledge back to China. They said he also lied about his affiliation with China’s Wuhan University of Technology.

During at least part of the time he was signed up with the Chinese university, Lieber was also a “principal investigator” working on at least six research projects funded by U.S. Defense Department agencies, court documents show.

A lawyer for Lieber did not respond to a request for comment.

(Reporting by Mark Hosenball and David Brunnstrom; editing by Chris Sanders, Chizu Nomiyama and Jonathan Oatis)

China wages ‘people’s war’ on coronavirus as cruises, companies hit

By David Stanway and Roxanne Liu

SHANGHAI/BEIJING (Reuters) – Chinese President Xi Jinping declared a “people’s war” on Thursday against the fast-spreading coronavirus whose impact has been felt around the world from slowing factory floors to quarantined cruise liners.

The death toll in mainland China jumped by 73 to 563, with more than 28,000 infections also confirmed inside the world’s second largest economy.

Xi, speaking to Saudi Arabia’s King Salman by telephone, said the whole nation was working as one to combat the virus and would maintain transparency.

Medical workers in protective suits attend to patients at the Wuhan International Conference and Exhibition Center, which has been converted into a makeshift hospital to receive patients with mild symptoms caused by the novel coronavirus, in Wuhan, Hubei province, China February 5, 2020. Picture taken February 5, 2020. China Daily via REUTERS

“China has a strong mobilisation capacity, rich experience in responding to public health incidents and is confident and capable of winning the battle for epidemic prevention and control,” Xinhua news agency paraphrased him as saying.

In a striking image of the epidemic’s reach, about 3,700 people moored off Japan on the Diamond Princess faced testing and quarantine for at least two weeks on the ship, which has 20 virus cases. Japan now has 45 cases.

Gay Courter, a 75-year-old American novelist on board, said he hoped the U.S. government would take the Americans off.

“It’s better for us to travel while healthy and also, if we get sick, to be treated in American hospitals,” he told Reuters.

In Hong Kong, another cruise ship with 3,600 passengers and crew was quarantined for a second day pending testing after three cases on board. Taiwan, which has 13 cases, banned international cruise ships from docking.

In China, sometimes dubbed the world’s workshop, cities have been shut off, flights cancelled and factories closed, shutting supply lines crucial to international businesses.

Companies including Hyundai Motor, Tesla, Ford, PSA Peugeot Citroen, Nissan, Airbus, Adidas, and Foxconn are taking hits.

Financial analysts have cut China’s growth outlook, with ratings agency Moody’s flagging risks for auto sales and output.

Nintendo Co Ltd said on Thursday delays to production and shipping of its Switch console and other goods to the Japan market were “unavoidable”.

Honda Motor Co was considering keeping operations suspended for longer than planned at its three plants in Wuhan, the epicentre of the virus, Japan’s Nikkei newspaper reported.

Indonesia said it stands to lose $4 billion in tourism if travel from China is disrupted for the whole year.

More than two dozen large trade fairs and industry conferences in Asia, where billions of dollars worth of deals are usually done, have been postponed.

Chinese-ruled Hong Kong, hit by months of anti-China unrest, said the coronavirus was hurting its economy and urged banks to adopt a “sympathetic stance” with borrowers.

But U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said he expected China to maintain its commitment to boost purchases of American goods and services over the next two years, as part of a Phase 1 trade deal.

And stock markets across the world rose on Thursday, buoyed by record highs on Wall Street and a move by China to halve tariffs on some U.S. goods that emboldened bets that the global economy would avoid long-term damage from the coronavirus.

RUSH FOR HIV DRUG

China, which has bristled at being ostracised, was considering delaying an annual meeting of its highest legislative body, the National People’s Congress, from March 5, sources said.

Several countries, including the United States, have banned entry to visitors who have been in China over the previous two weeks.

The World Health Organization (WHO) is investigating three virus infections linked to an international business meeting in Singapore last month. Singapore has reported 30 infections, some involving in-country person-to-person transmission.

Health officials in the United States and China want to get a vaccine to initial human testing within months, but drugmakers have cautioned they have a long way to go.

“There are no known effective therapeutics,” WHO spokesman Tarik Jasarevic said, when asked about reports of “breakthroughs” that boosted markets on Wednesday.

China’s National Health Commision said the HIV drug lopinavir/ritonavir could be used for coronavirus patients, without specifying how.

That triggered a rush, specifically for Kaletra, also known as Aluvia, which is drugmaker AbbVie’s <ABBV.N> off-patent version of lopinavir/ritonavir and the only version approved for sale in China.

Devy, a 38-year-old freelancer in Shandong province, said he was among hundreds who had asked people with HIV for medicine.

“When you are left alone, seeing the blur shadow of death far away, I think no one can feel calm,” Devy told Reuters.

People were also desperate for face masks. The city of Dali city, in southwestern Yunnan province, with only eight confirmed cases of the virus, was accused of intercepting a shipment of surgical masks bound for a municipality with 400 cases.

More than two dozen airlines have suspended or restricted flights to China and hundreds of foreigners have been evacuated from Wuhan.

The United States and China clashed on Thursday over the issue of self-ruled Taiwan’s exclusion from WHO meetings, where it is represented by China, with Beijing alleging political “hype-up”.

(Reporting by Lusha Zhang, Ryan Woo, Roxanne Liu, Liangping Gao, Sophie Yu and Se Young Lee in Beijing; David Stanway, Yilei Sun and Winni Zhou in Shanghai; Alun John and Noah Sin in Hong Kong; Ju-min Park in Tokyo; Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva; Kate Kelland in London; Writing by Robert Birsel and Nick Macfie; Editing by Andrew Cawthorne)

About 350 U.S. evacuees from virus-hit Chinese city land at California air base

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Two planes carrying about 350 Americans out of Wuhan, China, arrived at a U.S. military base in California on Wednesday, in Washington’s latest effort to bring its citizens home from the epicenter of the fast-spreading coronavirus outbreak.

The U.S. travelers on two State Department-chartered flights will be quarantined for 14 days after landing, the U.S. Defense Department said in a statement.

The jets landed at Travis Air Force Base, about midway between San Francisco and Sacramento, several local media reported, showing images of two planes on the tarmac.

One of the planes will continue on to Miramar Marine Corps Air Station in San Diego after refueling, the Pentagon said. Itwas due to arrive at Miramar between 6 a.m. and 9 a.m. Pacific time (between 1400 and 1700 GMT), a Marine Corps spokesman said in a statement.

The State Department separately said it may stage additional flights on Thursday but gave no other details.

KGO television showed video of people in white coverall suits getting off the plane in the predawn darkness at Travis Air Force Base.

The evacuees will be housed in a hotel on the base, the base said in a statement on its Facebook page.

“A safety cordon will be established, away from residential housing, to ensure the Travis mission can safely continue, the privacy of the evacuees can be enforced,” the statement said.

The United States and other countries are seeking to evacuate their citizens from China, where the coronavirus outbreak has killed 490 people and infected more than 23,000. Two deaths have been reported outside of the mainland.

U.S. health officials have reported 11 confirmed cases of the virus in the United States so far, including two person-to-person transmissions.

The Trump administration declared a public health emergency on Jan. 31, and announced the extraordinary measures of barring the entry of foreign nationals who have recently visited China and imposing a mandatory two-week quarantine for travelers from China’s most affected province of Hubei.

The State Department issued a “Do Not Travel” to China advisory to U.S. citizens, advising them to return on commercial flights if possible, though many commercial airlines have suspended flights to or from major Chinese cities.

U.S. officials have also restricted flights from China to 11 designated airports deemed capable of carrying out enhanced health screening.

Nearly 200 Americans were evacuated late last month, mostly U.S. diplomats and their families, and were flown to March Air Force Base east of Los Angeles.

(Reporting by Susan Heavey and Daniel Trotta; Editing by Andrew Heavens, Bernadette Baum and Bill Berkrot)

‘Fragile’ Africa prepares for high risk of coronavirus spread

By Juliette Jabkhiro and Kate Kelland

DAKAR/LONDON (Reuters) – An isolation ward stands ready at a hospital in Khartoum, Sudan. Laboratories in Senegal and Madagascar have the testing equipment they need. Passengers arriving at airports in Gambia, Cameroon and Guinea are being screened for fever and other viral symptoms.

Africa’s Centres for Disease Control and Prevention says it has activated its emergency operation centre in the face of what global health officials say is a high risk the coronavirus disease epidemic that began in China will spread to its borders.

On a poor continent where healthcare capacity is limited, early detection of any outbreak will be crucial.

The fear is great that a spreading epidemic of coronavirus infections will be hard to contain in countries where health systems are already overburdened with cases of Ebola, measles, malaria and other deadly infectious diseases.

“The key point is to limit transmission from affected countries and the second point is to ensure that we have the capacity to isolate and also to provide appropriate treatment to people that may be infected,” said Michel Yao, emergency operations program manager at the World Health Organization’s regional office for Africa in Brazzaville, Congo.

The Democratic Republic of Congo is barring its citizens from flying to China. Burkina Faso has asked Chinese citizens to delay travelling to Burkina, and is warning that they face quarantine if they do. Kenya, Tanzania and Rwanda have all suspended flights to China.

“What we are emphasising to all countries is that they should at least have early detection,” Yao said.

“We know how fragile the health system is on the African continent and these systems are already overwhelmed by many ongoing disease outbreaks, so for us it is critical to detect earlier to that we can prevent the spread.”

John Nkengasong, Africa’s CDC director, told a briefing in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa this week that the activation of the emergency operation centre would create a single incident system to manage the outbreak across the continent.

The Africa CDC will also hold a training workshop in Senegal for 15 African countries on laboratory diagnosis, he said.

The continent has more than doubled the number of laboratories now equipped to diagnose the viral infection, this week adding facilities in Ghana, Madagascar and Nigeria and to established testing labs in South Africa and Sierra Leone.

“By the end of the week we expect that an additional 24 countries (in Africa) will receive the reagents needed to conduct the tests and will have the test running,” a spokeswoman for the WHO’s Africa Region told Reuters.

(Additional reporting by Giulia Paravicini in Addis Ababa, Benoit Nyemba in Kinshasa, Thiam Ndiaga in Ouagadougou, Josiane Kouagheu in Douala, Pap Saine in Banjul and Saliou Samb in Conakry. Writing and reporting by Kate Kelland; Editing by Pravin Char)

Data suggests virus infections under-reported, exaggerating fatality rate

Data suggests virus infections under-reported, exaggerating fatality rate
By Cate Cadell

BEIJING (Reuters) – Fatalities from the coronavirus epidemic are overwhelmingly concentrated in central China’s Wuhan city, which accounts for over 73% of deaths despite having only one-third the number of confirmed infections.

In Wuhan, the epicenter of the disease, one person has died for every 23 infections reported. That number drops to one on 50 nationally, and outside mainland China, one death has been recorded per 114 confirmed cases.

Get Reuters full coverage on the coronavirus by following this link.

Experts say the discrepancy is mainly due to under-reporting of milder virus cases in Wuhan and other parts of Hubei province that are grappling with shortages in testing equipment and beds.

“In an outbreak your really have to interpret fatality rates with a very skeptical eye, because often it’s only the very severe cases that are coming to people’s attention,” said Amesh Adalja, an expert in pandemic preparedness at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in Baltimore.

“It’s very hard to say those numbers represent anything like the true burden of infection” said Adalja, who estimates current fatality rates are likely below 1%.

As of Tuesday, 24,551 cases have been confirmed globally. A 1% fatality rate would put total cases at over 49,000, based on the current death toll of 492.

Gauden Galea, the World Health Organisation (WHO) representative for China, told Reuters on Sunday that a “crude calculation” done by dividing total cases by deaths put the rate at 2% and said the rate was generally falling.

“Trying to really demystify those fatality numbers by including mildly symptomatic cases will help people to better understand the risk,” said Adalja.

CLUSTER OF DEATHS

In Wuhan, some patients with milder symptoms have been turned away from hospitals in recent weeks because of the strain on resources, several people in the city told Reuters. Others have opted to self-isolate.

Wuhan resident Meiping Wang said she and her sister both believe they have mild cases of the virus after their mother tested positive, but have not been tested.

“There is no use going to the hospital because there is no treatment,” Wang, 31, said in a telephone interview.

Under-reporting mild cases – which increases fatality rates – could have a negative social and economic impact as global health authorities race to contain the disease.

“It’s good to remember that when H1N1 influenza came out in 2009, estimates of case fatality were 10 percent,” said David Fisman, an epidemiologist at the University of Toronto, who was working in public health at the time. “That turned out to be incredibly wrong.”

“As the denominator is growing in terms of case numbers, and case fatality goes down and down… you start to realize it’s everywhere,” he said.

The global response to the coronavirus epidemic has been swift and fierce. Several countries have implemented partial or full travel bans on Chinese travelers.

“There are many actions going on all over the world that really are premised on the idea that this is a very severe illness,” said Johns Hopkins’ Adalja.

WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Monday that the bans were an unnecessary interruption to travel and trade.

(Reporting by Cate Cadell; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan)

U.S. announces more coronavirus cases, details quarantine plans for returning travelers

By Julie Steenhuysen

CHICAGO (Reuters) – The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Monday announced a second case of transmission of the new coronavirus within the United States and provided more detailed plans on how it will handle travelers returning from China as the country works to limit the outbreak.

“We expect to see more cases of person-to-person spread,” Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said during a conference call that included confirmation of a handful of new cases, bringing the U.S. total to 11.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is making nearly $250 million in emergency funds available to cover the cost of the response, an agency spokesman said on Monday.

Some of that may be used to support screening and monitoring returning U.S. citizens from China who are exempt from the presidential proclamation issued on Friday suspending entry of foreign nationals who had visited China within the past 14 days.

The CDC outlined enhanced screening plans for family members of U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents returning from China, who may face a 14-day quarantine if they had been in Wuhan or the Hubei province of China, the epicenter of the epidemic.

Passengers arriving in the United States on commercial airlines will be directed to one of 11 U.S. airports for additional health assessments. If they show virus symptoms such as fever, U.S. citizens and those who are exempt will be transferred for medical evaluation, and will not be allowed to complete their travel plans.

“CDC is working with the states to determine where travelers will be quarantined,” Messonnier said.

Flights with U.S. government employees being evacuated by the State department will go to military bases. They will be under federal quarantine for 14 days from when they left Wuhan.

The CDC has sent additional teams to specific locations where the planes will arrive.

Those who do not have symptoms will be allowed to continue to their final destination, and will be asked to stay at home as much as possible and monitor their health for 14 days.

Where people will be quarantined may differ depending on the operational plans laid out by states. Some of the designated airports have military bases nearby, while some states have planned to use hotels.

“It is very localized depending on the state and local considerations,” Messonnier said. “We do not believe these people pose a risk to the communities where they are being temporarily housed. We are taking measures to minimize any exposure.”

HHS on Sunday notified Congress it may need to transfer $136 million to support efforts by the CDC, the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response and the Office of Global Affairs to respond to the outbreak, the agency confirmed on Monday.

That followed a Jan. 25 notice to Congress that the CDC would tap as much as $105 million from a rapid response reserve fund to cover the costs for enhanced screening, transportation, and monitoring of U.S. citizens arriving from China.

Of the five new U.S. cases announced on Monday, one is in Massachusetts and the other four in California. Four of the five had recently traveled to Wuhan, where the outbreak originated.

One of the patients in California was infected through close contact with someone in the same household who had been infected in China. It marked the second instance of person-to-person spread of the virus in the United States after such a case was announced last week in Illinois.

The agency said it is currently monitoring 82 people for potential infection with the virus.

(Reporting by Julie Steenhuysen in Chicago; additional reporting by Manas Mishra in Bangaluru; Editing by Bill Berkrot)

Hong Kong records first virus death, Macau shuts casinos

By Farah Master and Ryan Woo

HONG KONG/BEIJING (Reuters) – Hong Kong reported its first coronavirus death on Tuesday, the second outside mainland China from a fast-spreading outbreak that has killed 427 people and threatened the global economy.

China’s markets steadied after losing $400 billion in stock values the previous day, and global markets also recovered from a sell-off last week. But bad news kept coming.

The Chinese-ruled gambling hub of Macau asked casino operators to close for two weeks to help curb the virus.

And in the latest major corporate hit, Hyundai Motor said it was to gradually suspend production at South Korean factories because of supply chain disruptions.

Hong Kong’s first fatality was a 39-year-old man with an underlying illness who had visited China’s Wuhan city, the epicentre of the outbreak, hospital staff said.

Chinese authorities, meanwhile, reported a record daily jump in deaths of 64 to 425. The only other death outside mainland China was a man who died in the Philippines last week after visiting Wuhan, the virtually quarantined city at the epicentre of the outbreak.

Total infections in mainland China rose to 20,438, and there have been nearly 200 cases elsewhere across 24 countries and China’s special administrative regions Hong Kong and Macau.

Thailand’s tally of infections jumped to 25, the highest outside China, while Singapore’s rose to 24, four of those from local contagion as opposed to visitors from China.

New cases were reported in the United States, including a patient in California infected via someone in the same household who had been infected in China.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has declared the flu-like virus a global emergency and experts say much is still unknown, including its mortality rate and transmission routes.

FOREIGN FEARS

Such uncertainties have spurred strong measures by some countries – offending Beijing’s communist government which has called for calm, fact-based responses instead of scaremongering.

The deluge of misinformation on social media – from a recommendation to eat more onions to a warning of spread via a video game – has led Asian governments to hit back with arrests, fines and fake news laws, alarming free speech advocates.

At least 16 people have been arrested over coronavirus posts on social media in Malaysia, India, Thailand, Indonesia and Hong Kong.

Australia sent hundreds of evacuees from Wuhan to an island in the Indian Ocean, while Japan ordered the quarantine of a cruise ship with more than 3,000 aboard after a Hong Kong man who sailed on it last month tested positive.

Thousands of medical workers in Hong Kong, which had seen months of anti-China political protests, held a second day of strikes to press for complete closure of borders with the mainland after three checkpoints were left open.

“We’re not threatening the government, we just want to prevent the outbreak,” said Cheng, 26, a nurse on strike.

The Asian financial centre has confirmed 17 cases of the virus and its public hospital network is struggling to cope with a deluge of patients and containment measures.

Hong Kong was badly hit by Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), another coronavirus that emerged from China in 2002 to kill almost 800 people worldwide and cost the global economy an estimated $33 billion.

WHO figures show SARS killed 299 people in Hong Kong then.

Chinese data suggest the new virus, while much more contagious, is significantly less lethal, although such numbers can evolve rapidly.

In Wuhan, authorities started converting a gymnasium, exhibition centre and cultural complex into makeshift hospitals with more than 3,400 beds for patients with mild infections, the official Changjiang Daily said.

U.S.-CHINA FRICTIONS

Raising the prospect of another major spat – just as trade frictions were easing – Beijing on Monday accused the United States of spreading panic after it announced plans to block nearly all recent foreign visitors to China.

A handful of other nations have done the same.

With the world’s second biggest economy facing increasing international isolation and disruption, some economists predict world output will shrink by 0.2 to 0.3 percentage points.

Many airlines have stopped flights to parts of China, with Japan’s biggest carrier, ANA Holdings <9202.T>, the latest to announce cuts, saying it would slash the number of flights to Beijing by two-thirds for at least seven weeks.

Hong Kong’s Cathay Pacific Airways Ltd <0293.HK> plans to cut 30% of global capacity over the short term, including 90% to mainland China.

Data from aviation statistics provider VariFlight showed 41 Chinese carriers cancelled nearly two-thirds of 16,623 planned flights for Tuesday as of 10:30 a.m. Beijing time (0230 GMT).

In addition, 10 regional airlines from Hong Kong and Taiwan had cancelled 162 flights, while 37 airlines from other countries cancelled 168 flights on the same day, it said.

each day since the start of February.

For a graphic comparing coronavirus outbreaks, see https://tmsnrt.rs/2GK6YVK.

(Reporting by Lusha Zhang and Ryan Woo in Beijing, Farah Master in Hong Kong, Cheng Leng and Winni Zhou in Shanghai, Roxanne Liu, Muyu Xu and Se Young Lee in Beijing, Brenda Goh and Zoey Zhang in Shanghai, Tom Westbrook in Singapore, Byron Kaye in Sydney, Matthew Tostevin in Bangkok, Linda Sieg, Sakura Murakami and Ami Miyazaki in Tokyo, John Geddie in Singapore, Kate Kelland in London, Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva, Ben Blanchard in Taipei; Writing by Robert Birsel and Andrew Cawthorne; Editing by Clarence; Fernandez and Alex Richardson)