China virus death toll passes 130; US, Japan evacuate citizens

LOCKDOWN SCENE A couple wearing surgical masks are the lone pedestrians on a deserted street in Wuhan in China’s Hubei province, where a deadly coronavirus strain has originated. The strain has killed more than 130 people in China and infected 6,000 more there and in other countries. —AP

BEIJING—The death toll from a new coronavirus in China rose sharply to 132 on Wednesday with nearly 1,500 new cases, as Japan and the United States flew their citizens out of the central city of Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak.

Several countries are trying to evacuate their citizens from Wuhan. A US charter plane departed from Wuhan carrying 200 Americans and a Japanese flight left with 200 Japanese aboard on Wednesday .

US officials said the White House was weighing whether to suspend flights to China in a drastic measure to control the spread of the disease.

“All options for dealing with infectious disease spread have to be on the table, including travel restrictions,” said US Health Secretary Alex Azar.

Airlines reduce flights

Fears of the spreading virus have already pushed airlines around the world to reduce flights to China and global companies to restrict employee travel to the country, while sectors from mining to luxury goods have been shaken by concerns over global growth in the event of a worst-case pandemic.

China’s National Health Commission said the total of deaths from the pneumonia-like virus rose by 26 on Tuesday to 132, almost all in the province of Hubei, which is under virtual lockdown, while the number of confirmed cases rose by 1,459 to stand at 5,974.

The number of cases in China now exceeds its tally of 5,327 infected with the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) coronavirus that killed about 800 people around the world in 2002-2003.

While some experts believe the new strain is not as deadly as SARS, it has created alarm because it is spreading quickly and key features are still unknown, such as its lethality and whether it is infectious before symptoms show.

FROMWUHAN TO TOKYO A Japanese chartered plane carrying evacuees fromWuhan, China,
lands at Haneda International Airport in Tokyo on Wednesday. Countries have begun evacuating
their citizens from the Chinese city hardest-hit by an outbreak of a newvirus. —AP

Evacuation plans

Australia said it would help some citizens leave Hubei and quarantine them on Christmas Island, a remote speck in the Indian Ocean best known for housing asylum seekers.

Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad said on Wednesday Kuala Lumpur was in talks with China to evacuate its citizens from Wuhan.

A total of 78 Malaysians are currently in Wuhan, he said.

The European Union said on Wednesday it would fly its citizens out aboard two French planes this week, and South Korea was due to do the same. Several other countries were assessing their options.

New cases were reported around the world, including Germany and the United Arab Emirates. In Germany, four people from the same company were infected in one of the first cases of human-to-human transmission outside China.

The German cases raise concerns about the human-to-human spread of the virus, which can be transmitted in droplets from coughs and sneezes and has an incubation period of up to 14 days.

In the UAE, the health ministry said a family that arrived from Wuhan had been diagnosed with a case of the new coronavirus. It was not immediately clear how many people had been infected.

Wuhan is racing to build two dedicated hospitals to treat coronavirus patients, with the first 1,000-bed hospital to be completed on Feb. 3. The capacity of the second will be expanded from 1,300 to 1,600 beds, the official People’s Daily said on Wednesday.

China fighting ‘demon’

“Chinese people are currently engaged in a serious struggle against an epidemic of a new type of coronavirus infection,” China’s President Xi Jingping told World Health Organization (WHO) chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in Beijing on Wednesday.

“The epidemic is a demon, and we cannot let this demon hide,” the Chinese leader said, pledging that the government would be transparent and release information in a “timely” manner.

China has taken its own drastic steps to stop the virus. Authorities sealed off Wuhan and other cities in Hubei province late last week, trapping more than 50 million people.

China has since extended the Lunar New Year holiday to keep people indoors as much as possible, and suspended a wide range of train services.

On Tuesday, authorities urged Chinese citizens to delay any foreign travel “to protect the health and safety of Chinese and foreign people.”

Zhong Nanshan, a renowned scientist at China’s National Health Commission, told the official Xinhua news agency on Tuesday that the outbreak could peak in a week or 10 days.

Officially called “2019-nCoV,” the newly identified coronavirus emerged late last year in Wuhan, a major transport hub and capital of the central province of Hubei with a population of 11 million.

While China has since moved to lock down most of Hubei, with a population around the same as Italy, the virus has still spread to more than a dozen countries from France to the United States.

The epidemic broke out on the eve of China’s Lunar New Year holiday, when millions of Chinese travel abroad and at home.

Many of those flights have now been canceled, and airports globally are screening passengers from China for signs of infection.