By Huizhong Wu, BEIJING China
The death
toll from a new coronavirus in China rose sharply to 132 on Wednesday with
nearly 1,500 new cases, heaping pressure on Beijing to control the disease as
U.S. officials said the White House was weighing whether to suspend flights to
the country.
The White House is holding daily meetings on the
outbreak and monitoring China-U.S. flights as a likely source of infections,
sources briefed on the matter told Reuters, though it had decided against
suspending air traffic.
A senior Trump administration official said the
administration had not asked airlines to suspend flights, after CNBC reported
that the White House had told airline executives it was considering such as
drastic move.
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 for global growth in the event of a
worst-case pandemic.
China’s National Health Commission on Wednesday
said the total number of deaths from the flu-like virus rose by 26 on Tuesday
to 132, almost all in Hubei province which is under virtual lockdown, while the
number of confirmed cases rose by 1,459 to a total of 5,974.
Several countries are trying to evacuate their
citizens from Wuhan, the city in Hubei at the center of the epidemic. A U.S.
government official who declined to be identified told Reuters a U.S. charter
plane had departed from Wuhan earlier on Wednesday, without elaborating on the
number of passengers on board.
The U.S. Embassy in Beijing earlier said a
chartered plane would pick up its consular staff on Wednesday.
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.
New cases were reported around the world including
Germany, where four people from the same company were infected after one of
them contracted it from a colleague while visiting their workplace in 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.
Known as “2019-nCoV”, the newly identified
coronavirus has created alarm because it is spreading quickly and there are
still important unknowns surrounding it, such as its lethality and whether it
is infectious before symptoms show.
It emerged late last year in Wuhan, a major
transportation hub and capital of central Hubei province with a population of
11 million people. China has since moved to lock down most of Hubei, with a
population around the same as Italy.
Health authorities believe the virus originated
from an animal and have pointed to a seafood market in Wuhan where wildlife was
traded illegally.
A team of scientists in Australia said on Wednesday
they had developed a lab-grown version of the coronavirus, the first to be
recreated outside of China, in a breakthrough that could help combat the global
spread of the disease.
The researchers at the Peter Doherty Institute for
Infection and Immunity in Melbourne said they would share the sample, which was
grown from an infected patient, with the World Health Organization and
laboratories around the world.
“Having the
real virus means we now have the ability to actually validate and verify all
test methods, and compare their sensitivities and specificities,” the Doherty
Institute’s virus identification laboratory head, Julian Druce, said in a
statement.
The virus has spread to more than a dozen countries
and cases such as those in Germany show it is spreading through human contact
and not only through travelers from China.
“The virus is a devil and we cannot let the devil
hide,” state television quoted Chinese President Xi Jinping said during a
meeting with World Health Organization (WHO) chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus
in Beijing on Tuesday.
“China will strengthen international cooperation
and welcomes the WHO participation in virus prevention... China is confident of
winning the battle against the virus.”
Asian stock markets erased earlier gains on
Wednesday with Hong Kong shares tumbling to a seven-week low as the surge in
new cases fueled fears about the economic impact of the virus. From France to
Japan, governments were organizing evacuations, while Hong Kong - scene of
anti-China unrest for months - planned to suspend rail and ferry links with the
mainland. United Airlines said it was suspending some flights between the
United States and China for a week from Feb. 1 due to a “significant decline in
demand.”
The outbreak has forced extensive travel curbs in
China, with many local officials trying to identify people who are from or have
visited Hubei province, and some communities trying to exclude all outsiders.
Some apartment blocks
have forbid delivery drivers from entering, forcing them to drop off their
parcels outside building gates.
The European
Commission said it would help fund two aircraft to fly EU citizens home, with
250 French nationals leaving on the first flight. - Reuters
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