The mass quarantine was ordered in the city at the center of the outbreak, but it’s not clear if the authorities there would be able to provide even basic care.
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More than 70 more deaths were reported in China. The doctor who warned of the outbreak — and was silenced by the police — was among the victims.
Death toll in China surpasses 600.
The death toll and the number of infections continued to climb in China, according to official data released early Friday.
Nationwide, more than 70 new deaths and 3,100 new cases emerged in the previous 24 hours, the national health authorities said Friday morning.
The new figures brought the total number of deaths in China to at least 636. And the total number of confirmed cases rose to 31,161.
Sixty-nine of the newly reported deaths occurred in Hubei Province, the heart of the outbreak, the authorities said, but there were also four deaths outside of the province: one each in Jilin, Henan, Guangdong and Hainan Provinces.
So far, the vast majority of deaths have been in Hubei, though deaths have also been reported in the Philippines, Hong Kong and other Chinese provinces. There are also more than 200 cases of infection outside China.
Many doctors believe that deaths and infections in China are undercounted because hospitals and laboratories are under severe strain to test for the virus. Local officials in Hubei Province, the center of the outbreak, have called on health care workers to speed up the process.
Many sick residents in Hubei also say that they have been turned away by overstretched hospitals, which lack test kits and beds.
Health officials focus on faster diagnoses.
The World Health Organization said on Thursday that it was working to strengthen global diagnostic capacity for the new virus, saying that efforts to control the disease’s spread “depend critically on the ability to detect the pathogen quickly.”
The W.H.O. said it had activated an international “network of specialized referral laboratories” to support individual countries’ labs in confirming new cases. It also said it would ship 250,000 test kits to 159 laboratories across the world, to help speed up diagnoses.
In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Thursday that it would distribute a new test to diagnose coronavirus infection to state and international laboratories.
Until now, the C.D.C. has performed all of the diagnostic testing being done in the United States and assisted with diagnoses of patients abroad. Doctors had to send patient samples to an agency laboratory and wait for a response, and the process could take days.
The distribution of the new test kit is expected to greatly speed efforts to diagnose patients. It will be sent to 200 labs in the United States and about 200 labs internationally.
Each test kit can process 700 to 800 patient specimens. Results are available in about four hours.
Wuhan is told to round up infected residents for mass quarantine camps.
A senior Chinese official has ordered the authorities in the city of Wuhan to immediately round up all residents who have been infected with the coronavirus and place them in isolation, quarantine or designated hospitals.
Sun Chunlan, a vice premier tasked with leading the central government’s response to the outbreak that is centered in Wuhan, said city investigators should go to each home to check the temperatures of every resident and interview infected patients’ close contacts.
“Set up a 24-hour duty system. During these wartime conditions, there must be no deserters, or they will be nailed to the pillar of historical shame forever,” Ms. Sun said.
The city’s authorities have raced to meet these instructions by setting up makeshift mass quarantine shelters this week. The shelters are meant for coronavirus patients with milder symptoms, the government has said. But concerns are growing about whether the centers, which will house thousands of people in large spaces, will be able to provide even basic care to patients and protect against the risk of further infection.
According to a widely shared post on Weibo, a popular social media site, “conditions were very poor” at an exhibition center that had been converted into a quarantine facility. There were power failures and electric blankets that could not be turned on, the user wrote, citing a relative who had been taken there, saying that people had to “shiver in their sleep.”
There was also a staff shortage, the post said, where “doctors and nurses were not seen to be taking note of symptoms and distributing medicine,” and oxygen devices were “seriously lacking."
The quarantine comes amid a lockdown of the city and much of the surrounding province of Hubei that has exacerbated a shortage of medical supplies, testing kits and hospital beds.
The quarantine comes amid a lockdown of the city and much of the surrounding province of Hubei that has exacerbated a shortage of medical supplies, testing kits and hospital beds.
Chinese doctor who warned of outbreak has died.
Dr. Li Wenliang
A doctor who was among the first to warn about the coronavirus outbreak, only to be silenced by the police, died on Friday after himself becoming infected with the virus, the hospital treating him reported.
The Wuhan City Central Hospital said at 3:48 a.m. Friday that the doctor, Li Wenliang, had just died. “We deeply regret and mourn this,” it said on the Chinese social media site Weibo.
Just hours earlier, the hospital had said it was still fighting to save Dr. Li, 34.
Dr. Li’s death set off an outpouring of grief and anger on social media, with commenters on Weibo, a Twitter-like website, demanding an apology from the authorities to Dr. Li and his family. “I want freedom of speech” also emerged as one of the top trending topics on the site, until government censors stopped the messages.
The police and others questioned Dr. Li in early January after he warned a circle of medical school classmates on Dec. 30 about a viral outbreak that he said appeared similar to SARS. The police compelled him to sign a statement denouncing his warning as an unfounded and illegal rumor.
The New York Times wrote about Dr. Li on Feb. 1. “If the officials had disclosed information about the epidemic earlier,” he told The Times, “I think it would have been a lot better. There should be more openness and transparency.”
Refunds for U.S.-China air travel increase 500 percent.
Demand for flights to mainland China from the United States took a nosedive in late January as the severity of the outbreak became clear, according to data from the Airlines Reporting Corporation, an industry-owned transaction clearinghouse.
Sales, which were only somewhat lower early in the month, were down 59 percent in the fourth week of January compared with that period the year before, according to the data, which is based on 1.8 million tickets sold in January 2019 and 2020.
Ticket refunds skyrocketed by 534 percent that week, year over year.
Demand for flights to Asia showed a smaller decline of 18 percent in the fourth week of January, with the number of refunds up 215 percent. Airlines around the world have cited such declining demand in recent weeks as they have severely cut service to mainland China, with the cancellations spreading to Hong Kong in recent days.
Air China, one of the most active nonstop carriers between the United States and China, cited that drop in demand this week in a request for federal approval to sharply reduce service. In an emergency request filed with the Transportation Department on Sunday, the airline said it wanted to replace its current American flights with just two routes, one serving each coast.
One route would connect Beijing with Los Angeles and San Francisco. The other would connect Beijing with Kennedy International Airport in New York and Dulles International Airport near Washington. The plan omits existing service to Newark, Chicago and Houston.
In 2018, Air China carried more passengers than any other airline on nonstop flights between the United States and China. Of the 8.5 million people who flew on such flights that year, about 19 percent flew on Air China. United Airlines was No. 2 with 17 percent.
Wynn Resorts, Estee Lauder and Nintendo join list of companies hit by coronavirus.
As the coronavirus spreads through China and the government tries to respond, the world is acknowledging just how much it has come to count on its No. 2 economy.
The American casino operator Wynn Resorts is losing between $2.4 million and $2.6 million every day that its casino in Macau, the semiautonomous Chinese territory, remains closed because of the coronavirus, the company’s chief executive, Matt Maddox, said Thursday.
This week, officials in Macau asked its 41 casinos to close for half a month, as they struggled to contain the coronavirus outbreak afflicting China and the region.
Three-quarters of Wynn’s revenue comes from Macau.
Estee Lauder, the luxury cosmetics company, warned that the outbreak would hit its financial results “in the near term,” predicting that sales in its third quarter of 2020 would be the most affected. It pegged this to the impact on air travel and tourism to key global shopping areas.
The American luxury brand Tapestry, which owns Coach, Kate Spade and Stuart Weitzman, said the outbreak was “significantly impacting” its business, with the majority of its Chinese stores closed.
Nintendo, the Japanese maker of video games and gaming devices, said Thursday that shipments of its Nintendo Switch game console to customers in Japan would be delayed.
And Yum Brands, which operates KFC and Pizza Hut franchises in China, had said earlier this week that nearly one-third of its restaurants had been closed because of the outbreak.
But ArcelorMittal, the world’s biggest steel maker, had a more positive outlook, saying it expected the virus to have “a short-term negative demand impact in China and to a lesser degree elsewhere,” but that demand would recover in the rest of the year.
The number of Americans quarantined on military bases continues to rise.
Two more flights evacuating Americans from Wuhan, China, the center of the coronavirus outbreak, are scheduled to land in the United States this week. Passengers will be quarantined at hotel facilities on Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio and Eppley Airfield in Omaha, Neb., government officials said.
Their arrival will bring the total number of evacuation flights to five. The first carried 195 Americans out of Wuhan last week; they are quarantined on a military base in Riverside, Calif. Two more flights landed in the United States early on Wednesday morning, and the 348 passengers, mostly American citizens, will be held at Travis Air Force Base in Fairfield, Calif., and at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar in San Diego.
All of the passengers have been ordered to remain in quarantine for 14 days from the time they left Wuhan. Two weeks is believed to be the maximum time it takes a person to become ill after being exposed to the coronavirus. Read more about what life has been like for them in quarantine.
Virus’s spread raises fears about Tokyo Olympics.
As the coronavirus continues to spread, the clock is ticking toward the start of the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo, raising concerns that the outbreak could disrupt the Games.
The opening ceremony is scheduled to be held in less than six months, on July 24, and Japanese officials sought on Thursday to allay fears that the dangerous virus would have any effect on the Games, athletes and fans.
“I’d like to make it clear that there have been no talks or plans being considered between organizers and the International Olympic Committee since the World Health Organization declared an emergency,” Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told Parliament.
Still, the threat remains. Only a few dozen cases have been confirmed in Japan, but the presence of a cruise ship off Yokohama with more than 2,000 quarantined passengers offered an all-too-vivid symbol of the disruptive potential of the virus.
Toshiro Muto, the chief executive of the Tokyo Olympic organizing committee, said it was important not to “unnecessarily stir up a feeling of crisis,” the Japanese public broadcaster NHK reported, but he allowed for a different scenario.
“I am extremely worried that the spread of the infectious disease could throw cold water on the momentum toward the Games,” he said. “I hope that it will be stamped out as soon as possible.”
W.H.O. will host a meeting of scientists.
To help stem the spread of the new coronavirus, the World Health Organization will convene a scientific meeting in Geneva on Feb. 11-12 to focus on speeding the development of treatments, diagnostic tests and vaccines.
At a news briefing on Thursday, W.H.O. officials said scientists still do not know exactly how the virus is transmitted and what the spectrum of severity is — in other words, how many people develop severe symptoms that can be fatal, and how many have mild cases.
“We know its DNA,” said Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the W.H.O. “We know it can be transmitted from one person to another. We know those most at risk are older people and those with underlying health conditions.”
“There is still a lot we don’t know,” he added. “We’re shadow boxing.”
W.H.O. reported about 3,700 new cases on Wednesday, a slight dip from the figure reported on Tuesday. Despite the decline, “it’s right now too early to make predictions” about the course of the epidemic, said Dr. Michael Ryan, executive director of W.H.O.’s Health Emergencies Program.
He warned that China is “still in the middle of a very intense outbreak, and we need to be careful.”
“Nearly 3,700 new cases of coronavirus in a single day is nothing to celebrate,” he added.
Italy confirms a third case
A third coronavirus patient has been confirmed in Italy, according to an official with the Italian health ministry.
The patient was one of 56 Italian evacuees from Wuhan, who arrived in Rome on Monday and were put in a military site in Rome.
Two other confirmed coronavirus patients in Italy, who are Chinese citizens from Wuhan, remain in critical condition at a hospital in Rome, where they are being treated with an experimental combination of antiviral drugs.
The Lazzaro Spallanzani hospital, which specializes in infectious diseases, said in a statement on Thursday that the World Health Organization had identified the drugs as “the most promising, based on the available data.”
One drug, ritonavir, is often used with other medications to treat H.I.V. and has shown “antiviral activity on coronaviruses,” according to the hospital. The other drug, remdesivir, was developed as a treatment for Ebola but has not yet been approved for use against any disease. There is some evidence that it could work against the new coronavirus, and Gilead, the company that owns the remdesivir patent, has donated doses to China.
With no proven cure in sight, the race is on to find an effective treatment for the new coronavirus. In China, scientists have reported preliminary success in treating coronavirus patients with a combination of Arbidol, an antiviral drug used for treating influenza in China and Russia, and Darunavir, an anti-H.I.V. drug. But the researchers did not say how many patients they had treated with the combination therapy, and their findings have not been reviewed by outside experts.
The Chinese authorities have also turned to other types of treatments. In a treatment plan released last week, the National Health Commission of China listed traditional Chinese remedies as well as antiviral drugs.
