Read updates in Chinese: 新冠病毒疫情最新消息汇总
New case in California raises prospect of local, person-to-person spread.
A second person in Northern California has been infected with the coronavirus without having any known risk factors, such as travel to China or exposure to somebody known to be infected.
The findings hints that the coronavirus may already circulating locally in California, passing from person to person.
Earlier this week, a person who had no known risk factors tested positive for the virus in Solano County, between San Francisco and Sacramento. The new infection is in Santa Clara County, south of San Francisco, which includes the city of San Jose; it was confirmed by Dr. Sara Cody, the county’s public health director.
Hundreds of Americans who were potentially exposed to the virus in Asia have been quarantined at military bases in California, including Travis Air Force Base in Solano County.
Fears take hold that a global pandemic is inevitable.
From eastern Asia, Europe, the Middle East, the Americas and Africa, a steady stream of new cases on Friday fueled fears that the new coronavirus epidemic may be turning into a global pandemic, with some health officials saying it may be inevitable.
In South Korea, Italy and Iran — the countries with the biggest outbreaks outside China — the governments reported more than 3,500 infections on Friday, about twice as many as two days earlier. South Korean officials were rushing to test thousands of members of a church at the center of that country’s outbreak.
Africa has long been a source of concern, and a case in Nigeria raised fears that more infections might lurk there undetected.
In Europe, caseloads soared as Belarus, Estonia, Lithuania, Wales and Northern Ireland reported their first confirmed infections.
More than 83,000 people in at least 56 countries have been infected, and more than 2,800 have died.
Unnerved by the rapid spread of the virus and the growing threat it poses to economies, financial markets around the world continued their slide on Friday, with U.S. stocks recording their worst week since the 2008 financial crisis.
Even as countries prepared for the likelihood of significant outbreaks, early missteps raised troubling questions about how nations — even those with robust health care systems — will handle a flood of cases.
The World Health Organization on Friday raised its assessment of the global coronavirus risk from “high” to “very high,” the most serious assessment in its new four-stage alert system.
“This is a reality check for every government on the planet,” said Dr. Michael J. Ryan, deputy director of W.H.O.’s health emergency program. “Wake up. Get ready. This virus may be on its way.”
The assessment addresses the risks of both uncontrolled spread of the virus and the resulting impacts.
“China’s bold approach to contain the rapid spread of this new respiratory pathogen has changed the course of a rapidly escalating and deadly epidemic,” the report said, noting that new, confirmed infections had fallen from more than 2,000 per day to a few hundred.
China’s strategy “has averted or at least delayed hundreds of thousands” of cases, and “played a significant role in protecting the global community.”
Trump could use a 1950 law to step up production of supplies, administration says.
President Trump could use a Korean War-era law to require manufacturers to speed up production of emergency supplies needed to fight the new coronavirus, Alex M. Azar II, the health and human services secretary said on Friday.
The Defense Production Act, enacted in 1950, allows the president to exert control over parts of the civilian economy when it is necessary for national defense — forcing industries to step up production, reallocating basic resources and imposing price controls.
Mr. Azar, at a White House press briefing, said there was no need to invoke the law so far, but it could be used, for instance, to help stockpile face masks and other supplies.
“I don’t have any procurements I need it for now, but if I need it, we’ll use it,” Mr. Azar told reporters.
President Harry Truman made extensive use of the law during the Korean War, and it has been invoked occasionally in the decades since then.
Markets slide as the virus spreads across the globe.
Stocks tumbled for a seventh consecutive day on Friday, recording the market’s worst week since the 2008 financial crisis.
The S&P 500 index fell about 0.8 percent, and the Dow Jones industrial average fell more than 1 percent. The S&P index lost more than 11 percent in the week, and almost 13 percent since its peak on Feb. 19.
The sell-off was fueled mostly by worry that measures to contain the coronavirus would hamper corporate profits and economic growth, and fears that the outbreak could get worse. The selling has in a matter of days dragged stock benchmarks around the world into a correction — a drop of 10 percent or more that is taken as a measure of extreme pessimism.
In Europe, the Britain’s FTSE 100 fell more than 3 percent and the Dax in Germany fell more than 4 percent. In Asia, the Nikkei 225 in Japan closed down 3.7 percent, the KOSPI in South Korea dropped 3.3 percent and the Shanghai Composite in China dropped 3.7 percent.
Mick Mulvaney criticizes the media for coverage of the virus.
Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, on Friday blamed the media for exaggerating the seriousness of coronavirus because “they think this will bring down the president, that’s what this is all about.”
Speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference, an annual gathering of conservative activists, Mr. Mulvaney played down concerns about the virus that is spreading around the globe and panicking investors.
Mr. Mulvaney said the administration took “extraordinary steps four or five weeks ago,” to prevent the spread of the virus when it declared a rare public health emergency and barred entry by most foreign citizens who had recently visited China. “Why didn’t you hear about it?” Mr. Mulvaney said of travel restrictions that were widely covered in the news media. “What was still going on four or five weeks ago? Impeachment, that’s all the press wanted to talk about.” The news media has been covering the global spread of coronavirus since early January.
How bad will it get? Here are six important factors.
As the coronavirus spreads, early research is drawing a clearer picture of how the pathogen behaves and the key factors that will determine how it can be contained.
Here are the considerations: The virus spreads easily, making it hard to contain. The fatality rate may be more than 1 percent, much higher than the flu. The incubation period is between two and 14 days, allowing the illness to go undetected. And the virus has spread rapidly because it started in a transportation hub.
In terms of response, the World Health Organization has praised China’s efforts, but critics fear a pandemic. A few drugs are being tested in clinical trials, but a vaccine is still at least year away.
U.S. Pacific Fleet takes steps to limit sailors’ exposure.
The U.S. Navy on Friday ordered all ships that have made stops in the Pacific, about 30 to 40 vessels holding several thousand sailors and Marines, to self-quarantine at sea for 14 days and said that all sailors who had traveled to high-risk areas should be closely monitored.
“At this time, there are no indications that any U.S. Navy personnel have contracted coronavirus,” the Navy said in a statement. “The health and welfare of our sailors, civilians and their families is paramount, and our efforts are directed at detection and, if required, prevention of the spread of this illness.”
“Operational impact is minimal, if at all,” said a senior Navy officer with experience in the Pacific. “Most deployed ships in 7th Fleet already stay out to sea for that long, if not longer, and there is no better place for a ship operationally than at sea. I would expect some schedule impact to ships that do have port visits within two weeks, but no cancellations.”
The American military has already confirmed one coronavirus case: A 23-year-old soldier based near Daegu, South Korea, has tested positive for the virus, the military said on Wednesday. He has been quarantined in his off-base residence, the military said.
South Korea is experiencing the largest coronavirus outbreak outside China.
The United States and South Korea have also postponed their joint military drills.
Unofficial death count in Iran is far higher than the government’s tally.
The official count of cases in Iran, the center of the Middle East’s coronavirus spread, continued to rise at an alarming rate, from 139 on Wednesday to 245 on Thursday to 388 on Friday, with 34 deaths.
And that, an independent count claimed, was a gross underestimate.
BBC Persia reported that it had asked Iranian hospitals one by one, and found 210 fatalities, suggesting that there were several thousand infections either undetected or unacknowledged.
The authorities in Iran denied the report, but the health minister warned of a “pretty difficult week” ahead.
Senior government officials and clerics have played down the outbreak and predicted it would soon be under control.
But the authorities have closed schools and canceled Friday Prayers in major cities, and several other countries have reported coronavirus cases in people who had recently been to Iran. And at least seven government officials have been infected, including a member of the president’s cabinet.
Mexico reports its first cases, which are linked to Italy.
Two men in Mexico who had recently visited Italy have tested positive for the coronavirus, Mexican officials said on Friday, confirming the first known cases in the nation.
The discovery makes Mexico the second country in Latin America, after Brazil, to confirm the presence of the virus.
One of the patients, a 35-year-old man, was being treated at a hospital in Mexico City, the authorities said. The other, a 41-year-old man from the state of Hidalgo, was being kept in isolation in a hotel in the state of Sinaloa, in northwestern Mexico, officials said.
Both men had direct contact with an infected man in Italy and with each other during a conference this month in Bergamo, Italy, they said.
In addition to the two infected people in Mexico, two other men who had been in direct contact with those patients are under observation, the deputy health minister for prevention and health promotion, Hugo López-Gatell Ramírez, said at a news conference.
New infections jump in Europe.
Italy, with the worst outbreak in Europe, continued to pose problems for the rest of the continent on Friday. Cases in 14 other countries can be traced back to Italy, the W.H.O. said, including the first infections in Northern Ireland and Wales, diagnosed on Friday.
Nations that only had a handful of cases at the start of the week reported dozens on Friday. Germany had nearly 60 cases by Friday afternoon, the government said — twice as many as a day earlier.
France reported 57 infections on Friday, more than triple the number it had counted on Wednesday.
“A new stage of the epidemic has been reached and we are now moving on to stage two,” said Olivier Véran, the health minister.
In Italy, officials extended the quarantine of ten towns in the Lombardy region by a week and warned that hospitals in the area were stretched to their limits.
All non-emergency surgery and routine medical exams have been postponed in the “Red Zone” encompassing the quarantined towns, but if the caseload continues to rise at the same rate, hospitals “will go into grave crisis,” the Lombardy government said in a statement.
Italy reported more than 800 infections on Friday — 531 of them in Lombardy, which includes the city of Milan. Eighty-five patients in Lombardy are in intensive care.
Nurses and doctors are getting ill, protective supplies are in short supply and treatment for other serious conditions may be compromised, officials said.
Switzerland reported nine new cases, bringing its total to 15, and said it was banning all gatherings of more than 1,000 people until March 15. The Geneva International Motor Show, an important annual automotive trade event, was among the gatherings that were abruptly canceled.
England reported two additional cases on Friday, both contracted in Iran, bringing the total in Britain to 19, health officials said.
Three countries in Eastern Europe — Belarus, Estonia and Lithuania — reported their first cases, all apparently linked to travel to either Iran or Italy.
Nigeria records the first infection in sub-Saharan Africa.
Four days after a resort in Spain’s Canary Islands placed guests on lockdown over coronavirus fears, guests were beginning to leave in small groups on Friday, even as those who remained continued to mingle in common areas, raising concerns about spreading the virus.
Some 723 guests from 25 countries and dozens of staff were left stranded at the four-star Costa Adeje Palace hotel in Tenerife when loose isolation measures were put in place Monday after four coronavirus infections were discovered there.
By Friday, many guests had been told that they should stay in the hotel for a two-week quarantine period. But some 130 vacationers were informed that they could leave the resort because they had arrived after the coronavirus patients had left the hotel, and hotel officials said they would all depart on Friday.
On Thursday, the hotel staff were told they could enter and leave the hotel if they adopted “necessary protection measures.”
But guests who remained confined to the resort have been allowed to wander its common areas, use its pools and restaurants, and health experts have warned that the loose policy could enable the virus to circulated among the guests or the staff.
“The risk is not large, but it is real,” said William Schaffner, a professor of preventive medicine and infectious diseases at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. “It looks like they are taking a chance.”
California prepares to confront a growing threat.
Gov. Gavin Newsom said this week that the state had pushed for improved and expanded testing, urging federal officials to alter a testing protocol that he considered “inadequate.” He also said that officials were actively monitoring people who might have come into contact with the pathogen.
California has had more coronavirus cases than any other U.S. state, and it has also been the nucleus of American quarantine efforts. The sense of concern escalated after officials confirmed what is believed to be the first documented case of community transmission, in Solano County, between San Francisco and Sacramento.
The governor sought to strike a delicate balance by quelling fears while acknowledging the seriousness of the situation. He told residents that the overall number of cases remained low and that the state government was well positioned to keep it that way.
Mr. Newsom has resisted declaring a state of emergency, a step that some local officials have taken largely to muster public health resources. But there are worries about the economic fallout, with events having already been changed or canceled. Both Facebook and Microsoft said they were pulling out of conferences scheduled for March and May.
Japanese province declares a state of emergency.
Officials in Hokkaido, the northernmost of Japan’s main islands, declared a state of emergency because of the pace of new infections there, the national broadcaster, NHK, reported on Friday.
The governor of the prefecture, Naomichi Suzuki, urged residents to refrain from going out over the weekend, the broadcaster said. School boards on the island had already moved to cancel classes, even before Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s request on Thursday that all schools nationwide close for about a month. Japan has more than 200 cases of the new coronavirus and four deaths, in addition to more than 700 cases and an additional four deaths from the Diamond Princess cruise ship, which spent two weeks quarantined while docked in Yokohama. The latest death, reported on Thursday, was of a man in his 80s on Hokkaido who had pre-existing health problems, the governor told reporters. Fifteen new cases were reported in the prefecture on Thursday, bringing the total number there to 54, the highest in Japan. Two new patients were children under 10, officials said.
Japanese officials are facing increasing pressure to take action amid discussion of canceling the Tokyo Olympics, scheduled to begin in July. Major events have been canceled or postponed around the country.
Reporting and research was contributed by Eric Schmitt, Rick Rojas, Marc Santora, Megan Specia, Katie Thomas, Russell Goldman, Melissa Eddy, Aurelien Breeden, Elian Peltier, Andrew Higgins, Abdi Latif Dahir, Jack Ewing, Choe Sang-Hun, Keith Bradsher, Alexandra Stevenson, Elaine Yu, Tiffany May, Karen Zraick, Wang Yiwei, Andrew Das, Jamal Jordan, Heather Casey, Joseph Goldstein, Jesse McKinley, Ian Austen, Kirk Semple, Richard Pérez-Peña, Josh Keller, Rick Gladstone, Farnaz Fassihi, Knvul Sheikh, Elisabetta Povoledo, Noah Weiland and Constant Méheut.
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