Coronavirus claims first life outside China as Wuhan enforces quarantine for all suspected patients

As the Philippines on Sunday became the first country outside China to report a death from the new coronavirus, authorities in Wuhan announced plans to quarantine all suspected patients and those known to have been in close contact with a confirmed case.

The victim in the Philippines was identified only as a 44-year-old man from Wuhan, the capital city of Hubei province at the heart of the outbreak.

Within mainland China, the death toll has risen to 360, while the number of confirmed cases increased to more than 17,000, China’s National Health Commission.

On Saturday, Wuhan confirmed 894 new cases, in line with a sharp upwards trend, after 576 were reported on Friday, 378 on Thursday, 356 on Wednesday and 315 on Tuesday.

Despite the spike, a study by scientists from the University of Hong Kong published in The Lancet on Saturday said that as of Tuesday, as many as 75,815 people in Wuhan may have been infected with the new coronavirus.

The research was based on the assumption that each infected person could have passed the virus on to 2.68 others.

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Two weeks after China confirmed that the coronavirus could pass from human to human, and 10 days since Wuhan was placed on an almost total lockdown, authorities in the city on Sunday ramped up their efforts to contain the contagion.

Under a new rule that took immediate effect, the government said anyone suspected of being infected with the virus or having been in close contact with a confirmed case would be relocated to a dedicated quarantine centre, whether they liked it or not.

“Patients shall cooperate,” it said in a statement. “Whoever refuses to cooperate will be subject to enforcement by the police.”

It did not say how many quarantine sites there were, where they were located or how many people would be affected.

However, while in the centres, patients would not be charged for their medical treatment, food or accommodation, but would be required to remain for as long as was deemed necessary by the medical staff looking after them, the statement said.

Meanwhile, hospitals and medical centres in Wuhan and across Hubei are coming under huge pressure as patient numbers continue to soar.

Adding to the pressure on the province’s doctors and nurses, Hubei governor Wang Xiaodong has ordered all hospitals and labs to complete the testing of all their existing samples within the next two days.

To help offset some of the demand, the new Huoshenshan Hospital in Wuhan, which took just eight days to build, is set to open on Monday. It will be staffed by 1,400 medical workers deployed by the military at the direct order of Chinese President Xi Jinping.

As medical workers continue to treat the tens of thousands of people affected by the outbreak, scientists from the Third People’s Hospital in the south China city of Shenzhen said they had found traces of the new virus in the faeces of some infected patients.

Health authorities had previously thought that the primary way for the disease to spread was through respiratory droplet transmission and contact, including people touching their faces after exposure to a surface contaminated with the virus. But the discovery in Shenzhen suggests there may be other ways for the deadly contagion to move from one person to another.

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Zhong Nanshan, a respiratory disease scientist who played a pivotal role in China’s fight against the severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) epidemic in 2002-03, was quoted by China’s state broadcaster on Sunday as saying it was possible for the coronavirus to be transmitted through excrement to the mouth.

“Because the virus has been discovered in the patients’ excrement we need to be on alert to see if it is a source of infection,” he said.

In another development, a 40-year-old man in the northern China region of Inner Mongolia was confirmed as being infected with the virus despite having no known exposure to any other patients, apart from living upstairs from one.

The man, from the city of Erdos, had also not been in contact with any wild animals or wet markets, nor had he travelled to Hubei, the region’s health authority said.

Elsewhere in the country, authorities in Huanggang in Hubei and Wenzhou, a coastal city in Zhejiang province about 900km (560 miles) southeast of Wuhan, tightened their restrictions on people’s movements over the weekend, allowing only one resident per household to go out every two days to buy necessities.

Aside from the human cost, the coronavirus outbreak has had a significant impact on China’s business community. On Sunday, the China 50 Economists Forum, a group led by Vice-Premier Liu He, said its annual meeting scheduled for February 16 in Beijing would be postponed indefinitely.

And in the world of sport, the organisers of the all-electric Formula E series said they had abandoned plans for a race in the southern island city of Sanya next month.

Meanwhile, the People’s Bank of China said on Sunday it would pump 1.2 trillion yuan (US$171.4 billion) worth of liquidity into the financial system on Monday to protect financial markets against a sharp fall and strengthen credit support for the economy amid the spiralling health crisis.

Reports of coronavirus cases have now been recorded in at least 23 countries – the World Health Organisation on Thursday declared the outbreak a global public health emergency – while the list of nations taking steps to keep out Chinese visitors continues to grow.

The United States, European Union, Russia, Australia, New Zealand and Singapore have all banned or restricted the entry of Chinese citizens, as well as foreigners who have recently visited China, to curb the spread of the virus.

The Philippines expanded its travel ban on Sunday to include all foreigners coming from China, widening an earlier restriction that covered only those from Hubei. Similarly, Indonesia has barred all visitors who have been in China at any time over the 14 days before their arrival.