Coronavirus Outbreak Triggers Wuhan Quarantine
2019-nCoV began to spread in Wuhan, China, in late December 2019. (Wikimedia Commons)
A coronavirus originating in Wuhan, China, has killed 80 as of January 26, prompting the Chinese government to quarantine the city of nine million people, the Xinhua News Agency reports. Authorities have confirmed more than 540 cases in mainland China as the virus begins to spread abroad.
Medical experts identified the new strain of coronavirus in January and confirmed its ability to spread between people, according to the South China Morning Post.
The contagious disease, which induces pneumonia-like symptoms, has no cure or vaccine. The outbreak is suspected to have originated at a Wuhan seafood market selling live animals.
Greatly exacerbating the impact of the disease are the 400 million people looking to return home before the Lunar New Year, according to the Washington Post. This extraordinarily busy travel season, called chunyun, is considered the largest annual human migration in the world. Moreover, Wuhan, the heart of the epidemic, acts as a vital transport hub for many travelers in central China.
In response to the breakout, the government has shut down all public transportation in and out of Wuhan. “Basically, do not go to Wuhan. And those in Wuhan please do not leave the city,” said Li Bin, vice-minister of the National Health Commission, in the latest public briefing. “We should not take this situation lightly and be on high alert.”
Zhong Nanshan, a leading Chinese expert on communicable diseases, corroborated Li’s statement. “We expect the number of infected cases will increase over the Lunar New Year travel period and we need to prevent the emergence of a super-spreader of the virus,” he told state broadcaster CCTV.
Cases of this coronavirus have also been identified abroad, including in Hong Kong, Thailand, South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, and the United States, according to data from the CDC and the National Health Commission.
The latest coronavirus outbreak bears some resemblance to the deadly SARS virus epidemic in China during the early 2000s, which killed 774 and caused $30 billion in economic losses. According to BBC, the genetic code of the two diseases are closely linked.
The SARS outbreak from 2002 to 2003 paralyzed the city of Hong Kong. However, the Chinese government initially underreported the number of infected cases and withheld information that would have saved lives.
Researchers from the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis at Imperial College London claim that the actual number of cases for the latest virus is also substantially higher than officially reported.
Their updated study on January 18 estimated that 4,000 people in Wuhan are experiencing coronavirus symptoms.
Nevertheless, the CCP’s Central Political and Legal Commission admitted to having learned “a painful lesson” from its mistakes with SARS nearly two decades ago, and it emphasized that only openness can prevent “turning a controllable natural disaster into a man-made disaster.”
As a result, President Xi Jinping has vowed to invest “all-out efforts” into curbing the virus’s spread, and top leaders warned that any local officials concealing new cases would “be nailed on the pillar of shame for eternity.”