Medical teams in Wuhan, in China’s Hubei province, treat a patient as Beijing records its first death. Photograph: Chine Nouvelle/SIPA/REX/Shutterstock
Medical teams in Wuhan, in China’s Hubei province, treat a patient as Beijing records its first death. Photograph: Chine Nouvelle/SIPA/REX/Shutterstock
A German man who tested positive for the strain of coronavirus sweeping across China was infected by a work colleague, officials said on Tuesday, in what is believed to be the first human transmission in Europe.
The Hong Kong leader, Carrie Lam, said on Tuesday the high-speed rail service between the city and mainland China would be suspended from Thursday, and all cross-border ferry services would also be suspended in a bid to stop the spread of coronavirus.
Grant Shapps, the transport secretary, has said the government is working on plans to repatriate UK nationals in Wuhan, the Chinese region at the centre of the coronavirus outbreak. He called on Britons in the region to contact the British consulate.
The head of the World Health Organization has said he is confident in China’s ability to contain a new coronavirus that has killed 106 people and he called for calm, Chinese media reported.
Footage has emerged appearing to show a man being forcibly removed from the Guangzhou metro by security staff for not wearing a face mask, after the South China province implemented a mandatory order to wear them because of the coronavirus crisis.
Unmasked man pulled off metro in China amid coronavirus crisis – video
Chinese companies are working overtime to produce masks amid soaring demand caused by the country’s coronavirus outbreak.
President Xi Jinping said on Tuesday China was sure of defeating the “devil” coronavirus, in comments carried by Chinese state television.
Xi spoke after he met the World Health Organization (WHO) chief, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, in Beijing to discuss how to protect Chinese and foreigners in areas affected by the virus and “possible” evacuation alternatives, a WHO spokesman said.
State television quoted Xi as saying:
The virus is a devil and we cannot let the devil hide. China will strengthen international cooperation and welcomes the WHO participation in virus prevention … China is confident of winning the battle against the virus.
A WHO panel of 16 independent experts twice last week declined to declare an international emergency. Traditionally, the WHO is reluctant to antagonise or ostracise countries dealing with epidemics for fear of undermining future willingness to report cases of infectious disease outbreaks.
Taiwan has reported its first case of domestic transmission of the new coronavirus.
Taiwan’s central epidemic command centre said the latest patient, the eighth, was the first case of transmission on the island as in all the previous cases the people had been infected first in China.
The new patient, a man in his 50s from central Taiwan, was infected by his wife after she returned from working in China and before she was subsequently diagnosed, the command centre said. The man is in a stable condition, it said.
The academic pubilsher Wiley has compiled 54 research articles relating to the coronavirus, listed them on a single page, and has made them free to read for the next few months, as the world battles to contain the outbreak.
Here is Wiley’s announcement:
Wiley has identified 54 articles related to the coronavirus and is providing free access to this research to support outbreak relief efforts in China and other countries. These important pieces of literature will remain free until April 2020, with the window of time extended as needed. Newly published articles related to coronavirus will immediately be free to access during this time period, and will be posted to the coronavirus research page.
Access to 54 medical and scientific articles includes research from the Journal of Medical Virology, Transboundary and Emerging Diseases, Zoonoses and Public Health and many more.
The coronavirus outbreak could last several months and its course is unpredictable, with many thousands more people likely to have been affected than official figures suggest, according to Dr Jennifer Rohn, a specialist in cell biology at University College London.
In an interview with the PA Media news agency, Rohn said it was possible the UK already has cases of coronavirus that have not been detected. “It is possible that somebody has slipped through the net,” she said. “The symptoms are incredibly common to lots of other things that aren’t harmful at all.”
But she added: “I wouldn’t be surprised if we got a couple of cases soon.”
According to Rohn, the virus was spreading more quickly than Sars but was less deadly. She said it was difficult to know how long the outbreak would last, adding: “It is hard to predict but, certainly, the cat is out of the bag.
“We don’t know the full picture – they are running very short on diagnostic kits in China – and the truth is we don’t know where all the people are who are infected.”
It was likely far more thousands of people are infected than the cases confirmed in China, she said.
Dr Rohn said it was possible the virus could last several months but it could also end as the seasons change. “Some of these respiratory viruses are seasonal – there could be a peak and then there’s a lull,” she said. “We may have some breathing space but to be honest we don’t know yet.”
Health experts say they are unsurprised by the human to human transmissions of coronavirus in Japan, Vietnam and Germany.
Dr Michael Head, senior research fellow in global health at the University of Southampton, said:
The reported human to human transmission in Germany and Japan is unsurprising to see. We will continue to see further similar cases outside of China, but the indications are at this stage that onwards transmission will be limited, so there will likely not be too many cases for example across Europe, and on a much lesser scale than we are seeing in China.
Prof Paul Hunter, professor in medicine, the Norwich Medical School, University of East Anglia, said:
The recent reports would now bring to a total of three confirmed cases – in Vietnam, Japan and Germany – who have not visited China but only been in contact with cases from China. The fact that person to person transmission is occurring outside of China is not too surprising. The Vietnamese case was reported by WHO and he was in contact with his sick father who had returned from China. The Japanese case was a tour bus driver who had driven around two groups of Chinese tourists and the German cases had attended a work-based training event also attended by a woman who only became ill two days later during her return to China two days later. The German case is most worrying because if the Chinese woman was indeed asymptomatic at the time of the training session it would confirm reports of spread before symptoms develop making standard control strategies less effective.
This new information reinforces the importance of Public Health England’s current advice that if anyone has returned from Wuhan in the last 14 days they should ”stay indoors and avoid contact with other people as you would with other flu viruses” and ”contact NHS 111 to inform them of your recent travel to the city”. I would add that this advice should also be followed by anyone who has been to any other area in China where the infection is known to be common or if they know they have been in contact with a presumed case.
There have now been 45 confirmed cases in 13 countries outside of China, with no deaths so far, the WHO’s spokesman, Christian Lindmeier, told a briefing in Geneva on Tuesday.
Reuters reports:
The WHO said a case in Vietnam involved human-to-human transmission outside China and a Japanese official has said there was a suspected case of human-to-human transmission there, too.
Andreas Zapf, the president of Bavaria’s office for health and food safety, said on Tuesday the person infected was 33 years old and had come into contact with a Chinese woman on 21 January.
Zapf said the woman was from Shanghai but her parents, who are from the Wuhan region, had visited her a few days earlier.
He added that she had arrived in Germany on 19 January, appearing not to have any symptoms, but began to feel ill on her flight home on 23 January. She sought medical treatment after landing and tested positive for coronavirus.
When that information was relayed back to the German company, a male employee said he felt like he had flu over the weekend and was on Monday advised to get medical treatment.
The head doctor at the clinic where the man is being treated told a news conference the patient was awake and responsive and he did not think the man’s life was at risk.
Bavaria’s health ministry said people who had been in contact with the man had been informed of possible symptoms, hygiene measures and transmission channels.
The risk to the UK population has been assessed as low. This has been raised from very low due to current evidence on the ability for the virus to spread between people.
Taiwan has raised its travel warning for China, saying people should avoid going unless absolutely necessary amid an outbreak of the new coronavirus there, Reuters reports.
The island has reported seven confirmed cases of the virus so far.
Taiwan’s central epidemic command centre said it had raised its previous advice and would extend to the rest of China an existing warning not to go to Hubei province unless totally necessary, though Hong Kong and Macau are excluded.
Taiwan also has rolled out strict curbs on Chinese visitors, restricting a vast majority of them.
Last week, Taiwan’s government announced a one-month ban on the export of specialist masks designed to be used for medical personnel, saying it had to look after the needs of its own people first.
Some pharmacies in Taiwan have reported shortages of face masks since the island reported its first case a week ago, and the government says it is working to ensure supplies.
In a separate notice on Tuesday, the government said it would release more stock of masks, but limit each person to buying a maximum of three.
However, it also issued a reminder that most healthy people do not need to wear masks all the time.
The Taiwanese president, Tsai Ing-wen, visiting people on Tuesday to extend lunar new year wishes, said the government was fully prepared to deal with the virus and people should not panic.
“Our anti-epidemic work does not take holidays, and is taking place 24 hours a day,” the presidential office quoted her as saying.
Germany confirms first human transmission of coronavirus in Europe
A German man who tested positive for the strain of coronavirus sweeping across China was infected by a work colleague, officials said on Tuesday, in what is believed to be the first human transmission in Europe, AFP reports.
The man had not visited China but a Chinese work colleague who was in Germany last week had started to feel sick on the flight home on 23 January, said Andreas Zapf, the head of the Bavarian state office for health and food safety.
He had attended a training session given by his Chinese colleague on 21 January at the office of a car parts supplier Webasto in Stockdorf in Bavaria and tested positive for the virus on Monday evening. Unlike the other patients, the 33-year-old had not recently travelled to China.
He remains in hospital in an isolation ward, but Zapf said he “was doing well”.
The Chinese woman immediately sought medical attention on her return to China and was confirmed to have caught the virus, which has spread rapidly in recent weeks after first emerging in the city of Wuhan.
The woman had recently returned from visiting her parents in the Wuhan region, Zapf said.
In a statement, the Webasto company said it had halted all business travel to and from China “for at least the next two weeks”.
Health officials are checking 40 people that the two infected workers have been in contact with recently, including colleagues and family members.
The head of the World Health Organization (WHO) and China’s president, Xi Jinping, have discussed ways to protect Chinese and foreigners in areas affected by the coronavirus and “possible alternatives” to evacuations, Reuters reports.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who arrived in Beijing on Monday, will return to Geneva on Wednesday, WHO spokesman Christian Lindmeier told a Geneva briefing. The WHO emergency committee is being “kept in the loop” on the evolution of the outbreak, which has spread to 13 other countries, he said.
The WHO has not seen onward human-to-human spread of the virus by travellers returning from China apart from a second family member infected by a returning relative in Vietnam, which is “good news but of course this could change”, Lindmeier said.
This startling footage shows football teams playing in China’s domestic league arriving in facemasks, then playing their match in an empty stadium in Shanghai.
Coronavirus concerns sees teams arrive in face masks and play at empty stadium in Shanghai pic.twitter.com/rFS8viOJ9E
