Destinations known | China coronavirus: unchecked flow of Chinese tourists helped to spread the disease

With most Lunar New Year travel having begun in the 15 days before the new year, bans and quarantines might have been too little, too late

Sars spread to 37 countries when Chinese outbound tourism was a mere suggestion of the behemoth it has become

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Travellers wearing masks queue at the West Kowloon high-speed railway station, in Hong Kong, on January 23. Photo: Winson Wong

Mercedes Hutton

Published: 8:30am, 29 Jan 2020Updated: 9:19am, 31 Jan 2020

The Year of the Rat scurried in with barely a squeak, pursued by a deadly epidemic. The coronavirus outbreak, which is believed to have originated at a food market in Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province, has killed more than 100 and infected thousands of others across China. The pneumonia-like virus has also spread beyond the nation’s borders, to several countries in Asia and as far as Australia, France, Germany and the United States.

The timing is terrible. We are in the midst of the Lunar New Year period, the world’s biggest annual human migration, when hundreds of millions of Chinese return to distant homes or take holidays, both domestically and internationally.

Travel bans have been imposed on a number of cities in Hubei, affecting tens of millions of people, and the Ministry of Culture and Tourism ordered travel agencies and tour companies to stop selling tours of all description from January 24. However, many fear that was too little, too late, as the mass movement would have, as usual, begun 15 days before Lunar New Year’s day, which, this year, fell on January 25. In an interview with Caixin magazine, virologist Guan Yi, director of the State Key Laboratory of Emerging Infectious Diseases at the University of Hong Kong, said that the “golden time” to contain the virus had passed.

Wuhan, a city of 11 million people, went into lockdown on January 23, with planes and trains out of the city cancelled, as were buses, subways and ferries within it. A notice published by local officials the previous evening said, “citizens should not leave the city unless there are special conditions”.

With no information on when services would resume, the South China Morning Post reported that “residents began rushing to Wuhan’s Hankou Railway Station and airport soon after the government announcement”. One man described the station being “as packed as anywhere in China during the Spring Festival travel rush”, the main difference being a proliferation of worried expressions, only half obscured by now mandatory face masks. On January 26, Wuhan’s mayor, Zhou Xianwang, revealed that about 5 million residents had left the city before the travel ban came into force.

People elsewhere are worried, too, haunted by the spectre of severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars), another form of coronavirus, which infected more than 8,000 people across 37 countries and resulted in 774 deaths worldwide, from November 2002 to July 2003.

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Destinations known | China coronavirus: unchecked flow of Chinese tourists helped to spread the disease

With most Lunar New Year travel having begun in the 15 days before the new year, bans and quarantines might have been too little, too late Sars spread to 37 countries when Chinese outbound tourism was a mere suggestion of the behemoth it has become

With most Lunar New Year travel having begun in the 15 days before the new year, bans and quarantines might have been too little, too late

Sars spread to 37 countries when Chinese outbound tourism was a mere suggestion of the behemoth it has become