The toll of the viral pneumonia epidemic in China has risen to 56 dead and nearly 2,000 people are infected, authorities said Sunday after the warning from President Xi Jinping on an accelerated spread of the coronavirus.
The epidemic has reached Europe and Australia, despite the strengthening of measures taken to try to stop its spread.
As of Monday, Chinese travel agencies will no longer be able to sell hotel reservations or group stays, the CCTV television channel said.
The crisis comes at the crossroads of New Year, when the Chinese take advantage of their seven days off to travel from one end of their country to the other.
Military doctors have been dispatched to Wuhan, the city in central China where the virus, which is currently de facto quarantined, appeared in December, and construction of a second emergency hospital has started.
Fifteen new deaths have been recorded, including a first death in Shanghai, and at least 688 new cases of coronavirus infections have been confirmed, for a total of 1,975 in the country, according to the national health commission.
– “Serious situation” –
Authorities in Tianjin, a city of 15 million, announced on Sunday the suspension from Monday of long-distance bus connections, becoming the second major city to take such action after Beijing.
China is thus multiplying initiatives to try to halt the progression of the coronavirus now present on four continents.
“In the face of the grave situation of an accelerating epidemic (…) it is necessary to strengthen the centralized and unified leadership of the Party’s Central Committee,” said President Xi Jinping during a committee meeting. of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party, the seven-member body that heads China.
France for its part announced Friday evening three confirmed cases of contamination, presented as the first in Europe, Australia reporting on Saturday of four patients, people recently returned from China.
Half a dozen countries in Asia are now affected and a second case has been confirmed in the United States. A suspected case was first detected in Canada.
The study of the first cases, however, tends to show that the mortality rate of this virus named 2019-nCoV, of the coronavirus family, is quite low.
This rate “is currently less than 5 percent,” judges French professor Yazdan Yazdanpanah, an expert with the WHO and who has treated patients in France.
Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, with 774 deaths worldwide in 2002/2003, had a mortality rate of 9.5%.
– Western countries are mobilizing –
China entered the year of the Rat under the sign of the coronavirus.
No firecrackers, no dragon dances. For New Year’s Day, the streets of Wuhan are as dead, the few passers-by covering their faces with a protective mask whose wearing is mandatory, as found by an AFP team.
In town, you have to wait hours to be able to see a doctor.
At the limits of the prohibited zone, about twenty kilometers east of the city center, vehicles attempting to cross a motorway toll must turn around.
Trains and planes are in principle no longer allowed to leave Wuhan since Thursday. Western countries are mobilizing to organize the evacuation of their nationals in the coming days.
Besides Wuhan, virtually the entire province of Hubei is cut off from the world, bringing the total number of confined inhabitants to over 56 million, almost the population of South Africa.
In a pharmacy, employees in full suits and equipped with surgical gloves, welcome customers.
Others stock up on masks and disinfectants in one of the few supermarkets still open.
– Overwhelmed hospitals –
The army sent three planes to the forbidden zone from which 450 military doctors and other medical personnel landed on Friday evening.
Some of them have experience in the fight against Ebola and SARS, a strain similar to the new coronavirus, which had killed 650 people in mainland China and Hong Kong between 2002 and 2003.
With hospitals overwhelmed, high-speed construction of a second site to accommodate more than a thousand beds has started in Wuhan. It must be completed … within two weeks, according to public media.
All but three deaths have been recorded in this city or elsewhere in Hubei.
In Beijing in particular, the New Year festivities have been canceled. The capital seemed deserted and its restaurants were practically empty.
In Hong Kong, where five cases of contamination were recorded, the maximum alert was decreed, resulting in the cancellation of the marathon and school closings. All travelers arriving from mainland China will have to answer a medical questionnaire
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