BEIJING — As officials grow increasingly fearful about their ability to contain the fast-spreading outbreak of a novel coronavirus, this metropolis recorded its first death on Monday, hundreds of foreign nationals prepared to flee the country, and the U.S. government warned Americans to avoid all nonessential travel to China and planned to boost airport staff to screen nearly all passengers from there.
Late Monday, a top U.S. health official criticized Chinese authorities for not inviting U.S. and other international investigative agencies to join them in researching the new virus. While China has been more transparent than it was during the 2003 SARS outbreak, U.S. officials are still getting their information through press briefings rather than from direct transfer of scientific data, said Anthony S. Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
In the United States, 110 people in 26 states are being tested for possible infection, but only five so far — all people who traveled from Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province in central China — are confirmed to have the infection, the CDC said Monday. No one in the United States has died, and there is no known case yet of the virus spreading within the country.
Among the most urgent questions is whether the unprecedented quarantine around the outbreak’s epicenter, in Hubei, will be effective. Widespread suspicions on Chinese social media that government officials mishandled the early stages of the crisis were fanned dramatically on Monday by the Wuhan’s mayor’s interview.
Many other countries, including Japan, France and Sri Lanka, are seeking to evacuate their citizens from the coronavirus epicenter of Wuhan. The German government said Monday that it was still “considering” an evacuation.Monika Sethuraman, a PhD student from India, described Wuhan as a “ghost town” when she stepped out of her university dormitory for the first time in four days Monday to stock up on supplies. She bought vegetables to last for three weeks.
Officials in the United States and China have said the best estimate so far of the coronavirus’s contagiousness is that it will spread to between 1.5 and 3 people from every person who is sick. That is much less transmissible than measles, for which the rate can be as high as 18. But any number above one is problematic; only by lowering the rate below one can an outbreak be suppressed over time.
One belt one road and one coronavirus.