US President Donald Trump holds news conference on the coronavirus
outbreak at the White House on February 26, 2020. PHOTO | REUTERS
Summary
- The virus that can lead to pneumonia is believed to have originated in a market selling wildlife in the central Chinese city of Wuhan late last year. It has infected about 80,000 people and killed more than 2,700, the vast majority in China.
- While radical quarantining measures have helped slow the rate of transmission in China, it is accelerating elsewhere.
- Germany, which has around 20 cases, said it was already impossible to trace all chains of infection, and Health Minister Jens Spahn urged regional authorities, hospitals and employers to review their pandemic planning.
The number of new coronavirus infections inside China -
the source of the outbreak - was for the first time overtaken by fresh
cases elsewhere on Wednesday, with Italy and Iran emerging as epicentres
of the rapidly spreading illness.
Asia reported
hundreds of new cases, Brazil confirmed Latin America’s first infection
and the new disease - Covid-19 - was also detected for the first time
in Pakistan, Sweden, Norway, Greece, Romania and Algeria.
US
health authorities, managing 59 cases so far - mostly Americans
repatriated from a cruise ship in Japan - have said a global pandemic is
likely.
US President Donald Trump, seeking to calm
markets and an increasingly worried public, said in a live broadcast
that the United States was “very very ready” to face the virus threat
and that Vice President Mike Pence would be in charge of the national
response. It was one of just a handful of times that the president has
appeared in the White House briefing room.
Stock
markets across the world have lost $3.3 trillion of value in four days
of trading, as measured by the MSCI all-country index.
Wall Street reversed earlier gains on Wednesday afternoon and
oil prices dropped to their lowest level in over a year, spooked in part
by health officials saying dozens of people who had been in China were
being monitored in suburbs of populous New York city - although no
confirmed cases have been found.
New York Mayor Bill de
Blasio urged the federal government to tighten testing for visitors
from a range of countries where the virus has been spreading, adding
that its eventual detection in the city was “100 percent certain.”
The
virus that can lead to pneumonia is believed to have originated in a
market selling wildlife in the central Chinese city of Wuhan late last
year. It has infected about 80,000 people and killed more than 2,700,
the vast majority in China.
While radical quarantining measures have helped slow the rate of transmission in China, it is accelerating elsewhere.
TRACING INFECTION CHAINS
Germany,
which has around 20 cases, said it was already impossible to trace all
chains of infection, and Health Minister Jens Spahn urged regional
authorities, hospitals and employers to review their pandemic planning.
The
World Health Organisation (WHO) said China had reported 412 new cases
on Tuesday, while there were 459 in 37 other countries.
However,
WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus advised diplomats in Geneva on
Wednesday against speaking of a pandemic - which the WHO defines as the
worldwide spread of a new disease.
“Using the word
pandemic carelessly has no tangible benefit, but it does have
significant risk in terms of amplifying unnecessary and unjustified fear
and stigma, and paralysing systems,” he said. “It may also signal that
we can no longer contain the virus, which is not true.”
As
panic increased, Mexican authorities barred a cruise ship from docking
at one of its ports over what the ship’s company said was a single case
of common seasonal flu.
The
WHO says the outbreak in China peaked around February 2, after measures
that included isolating its epicentre Hubei province. It said only 10
new cases were reported in China on Tuesday outside Hubei.
There
is no known vaccine for the virus. US pharmaceutical firm Gilead
Sciences Inc said on Wednesday it had started two late-stage studies to
test its experimental antiviral drug remdesivir in humans.
FIRST LATIN AMERICAN CASE
As
the cases have rippled outwards, the effects on large gatherings have
increased. In Japan, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe called for sports and
cultural events to be scrapped or curtailed for two weeks as concern
mounted for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, while sources told Reuters the
International Monetary Fund was considering whether to make its April
meeting in Washington virtual.
Latin America’s first
case was confirmed in a 61-year-old man in Sao Paulo, Brazil, who had
recently visited Italy, a new front line in the global outbreak.
The
diagnosis coincided with the carnival holiday, a peak time for domestic
travel. Brazil’s stock index fell over seven percent.
In
addition to Brazil, Italians or people who recently visited Italy have
tested positive in Algeria, Austria, Croatia, Greece, Romania, Spain,
Sweden and Switzerland. Italy itself has reported more than 400 cases,
centred on the industrial heartlands of Lombardy and Veneto.
A hotel in Tenerife in Spain’s Canary Islands was locked down over cases linked to Italy.
“It’s very scary because everyone is out, in the pool, spreading the virus,” said 45-year-old hotel guest Lara Pennington.
In France, a second person died - a teacher who had not visited any country with a known outbreak.
There have been nearly 50 deaths outside China, including 12 in Italy and 19 in Iran, according to a Reuters tally.
While
Iran has reported only 139 cases, epidemiologists say the death rate of
around two percent seen elsewhere suggest that the true number of cases
must be many times higher.
Cases linked to Iran have
been reported across the Middle East. Iraq imposed travel bans to
affected countries and barred public gatherings.
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