Jumat, 06 Maret 2020

Coronavirus Cases Exceed 100,000 as Countries Struggle to Contain Spread - The Wall Street Journal

Travelers pass soldiers conducting disinfection work at an airport in Daegu, South Korea, on Friday.

Photo: kim kyung-hoon/Reuters
By
Lucy Craymer

The number of confirmed coronavirus cases globally topped 100,000 on Friday, as infections outside of China continued to mount and many countries and cities struggled to get the epidemic under control.

There were 100,329 confirmed cases of the virus world-wide, more than a fifth of which were in countries other than China, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. South Korea, the second worst-hit country, reported another jump in infections, bringing its tally to 6,593. The novel coronavirus is now in around 90 countries, less than three months after it was first identified in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in December.

High-Speed Trains, International Flights: How the Coronavirus Spread

Chinese health authorities on Friday reported 143 new infections, but said that for the first time there were no new cases in the wider Hubei province outside of its capital of Wuhan in the previous day. The vast majority of China’s 80,555 cases have been in Hubei province, and authorities in late January locked down Wuhan and neighboring cities to help contain the disease’s spread.

Globally, 3,406 individuals have died from the illness known as Covid-19 and 55,694 have recovered. In the U.S., there have been 233 confirmed cases and 12 deaths, mostly in the state of Washington, where some schools in the Seattle area will be closed for two weeks and companies have told employees to work from home.

On Friday, a top Hong Kong university released research that surmised the “fatality risk” for symptomatic Covid-19 patients was 1.4%, based on data its researchers analyzed from the city of Wuhan.

That is lower than the 3.4% mortality rate cited earlier this week by the World Health Organization, which was calculated from the number of deaths relative to the total number of confirmed infections.

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U.S. health officials, in contrast, have said they think the mortality rate for the novel coronavirus is likely between 0.1% and 1%, in part because there could be many unreported cases or asymptomatic carriers of the virus.

Gabriel Leung, dean of the Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine at the University of Hong Kong, said that the estimated 1.4% mortality rate among people who showed symptoms means Covid-19 is deadlier than the 2009 swine flu epidemic, though less so than the 1918 influenza pandemic.

And given the large and rising global tally of coronavirus infections, “that means a lot of lives,” he added.

Dr. Leung’s organization—which is a WHO Collaborating Center for Infectious Disease Epidemiology and Control—calculated the disease’s mortality rate from its own estimates of how many people in Wuhan had symptoms of the disease before Feb. 25, rather than using case numbers reported by the Chinese government, which some experts suspect are understated. During the period they studied, there were 2,080 reported deaths.

The Latest on the Coronavirus

  • Johns Hopkins: 100,329 cases of infection world-wide, 3,406 deaths
  • U.S. has 233 cases, 12 people have died
  • South Korea reports 6,593 cases

On Friday, global stocks fell again and investors piled into safe government bonds on rising expectations that central banks will take more decisive action to cushion the economic blow from the coronavirus epidemic.

A day earlier, a top WHO official warned that many countries weren’t doing enough to help contain the epidemic. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO’s director general, said that while the bulk of coronavirus cases are currently concentrated in a few countries, other governments need to respond more forcefully to the global spread by activating emergency plans, educating the public, readying hospitals and increasing their capacity for testing for the virus.

A worker disinfects the Hankou Salvation Church in Wuhan, China, on Friday.

Photo: str/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

“This epidemic can be pushed back, but only with a collective, coordinated and comprehensive approach that engages the entire machinery of government,” Mr. Ghebreyesus told a briefing at the U.N. health agency’s Geneva headquarters late Thursday. “This is not a drill,” he added.

Other countries in Asia reported higher case numbers on Friday. Japanese authorities said there were 31 new cases, taking the country’s total to 348. Of those, 35 showed no symptoms.

A report from the Asian Development Bank on Friday estimated the coronavirus epidemic could reduce the world’s economic output by $77 billion-$347 billion, or 0.1%-0.4%, of global gross domestic product.

It said the virus will have a significant impact on developing Asian economies through numerous channels, including sharp declines in domestic demand, lower tourism and business travel, trade and production linkages, supply disruptions and health effects.

More on the Coronavirus

Write to Lucy Craymer at Lucy.Craymer@wsj.com

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2020-03-06 13:54:00Z
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Tensions escalate in Asia over coronavirus - Al Jazeera English

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  1. Tensions escalate in Asia over coronavirus  Al Jazeera English
  2. Coronavirus: Japan and South Korea in quarantine row  BBC News
  3. Shinzo Abe, Japan’s Political Houdini, Can’t Escape Coronavirus Backlash  The New York Times
  4. India, South Korea report new coronavirus cases: Live updates  Al Jazeera English
  5. Coronavirus quarantine plans ignite row between South Korea and Japan  The Guardian
  6. View Full Coverage on Google News

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2020-03-06 12:55:28Z
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Coronavirus updates: COVID-19 deaths near 3,300 as U.S. scrambles to test thousands - CBS News

Health officials across the globe were scrambling to contain the coronavirus epidemic Friday, and grasping to better understand it. At least 98,000 people in almost 90 countries have caught the new COVID-19 disease that emerged late last year in China.

It has killed almost 3,300 people, but according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins, more than 55,000 patients have recovered from the flu-like illness. Chinese officials have confirmed more than 50,000 people have recovered in that country alone. While it's clear the vast majority infected get only mild cases, authorities have been unable to say definitively how many of those who catch COVID-19 are likely to die from it.

To get the data needed to answer that question, and to understand how easily the virus spreads and how best to stop it, the World Health Organization issued a plea Thursday for every country to pull out "all the stops" to test large numbers of people, and to aggressively control outbreaks where they do pop up.

There have been 12 deaths in the United States — 11 in Washington state and one in California, which has declared a state of emergency as it tests passengers on a cruise ship quarantined off the San Francisco coast. There were at least 230 confirmed cases in 21 states, including Nevada and Colorado which reported their first cases on Thursday.

The Trump administration has faced criticism over the availability of test kits in the U.S.  Vice President Mike Pence has said any American would be able to get tested for the disease — but he acknowledged Thursday, as the government raced to distribute tests, that the capacity wasn't there yet.

President Trump was expected to sign an $8 billion dollar emergency spending bill Friday to help fund work on a vaccine, and to help the U.S. catch up to other nations with testing. 

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2020-03-06 12:19:00Z
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Dubai ruler abducted and imprisoned his princess daughters, UK court rules - USA TODAY

Kim Hjelmgaard USA TODAY

Published 6:40 AM EST Mar 6, 2020

LONDON – The billionaire ruler of Dubai, Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al-Maktoum, orchestrated the abductions, torture and imprisonment of two of his princess daughters, according to documents unsealed this week by a British judge. 

High Court Judge Andrew McFarlane's ruling was part of a "fact-finding" judgment connected to a separate ongoing child custody case between Sheikh Mohammed and his estranged ex-wife, Princess Haya Bint Al-Hussein. 

Dubai's leader, 70, launched legal action in Britain in May last year against Princess Haya, 45, seeking the return of their two small children to Dubai. Princess Haya, who is the daughter of the late King Hussein of Jordan, is Sheikh Mohammed's sixth wife. She wants their children, 12 and 8, to stay in Britain, where she was educated and has close ties, over fears they could be harmed if returned to Dubai. Princess Haya's lawyers argued Sheikh Mohammed's treatment of his two older daughters showed her children were at risk of being abducted too.

The ruling does not amount to a criminal charge.

Instead, Thursday's ruling relates to events surrounding the disappearances of two of Sheikh Mohammed's daughters from a previous marriage: Princess Shamsa, who vanished from the streets of Cambridge in 2000, when she was 19; and Princess Latifa, who planned her escape from Dubai’s ruling family for seven years, running away from what she said was her father's oppressive and cruel treatment.

Princess Latifa was seized by Indian army commandos in 2018 in the Indian Ocean and returned to Dubai, when she was 32. She sought to flee the city-state on a private sailing yacht captained by a former French intelligence officer. Her plight, which almost defies belief, was highlighted by USA TODAY and other media.

Princess Latifa tried to flee Dubai: She left a video to prove it

Sheikh Mohammed attempted to keep McFarlane's judgement out of the public domain. But his appeal was rejected after the court ruled it to be in the public interest. McFarlane found that Princess Haya’s allegations about the threats she and her children faced from Sheikh Mohammed were credible because of the abductions and disappearances of Princess Shamsa and Princess Latifa. The former has not been seen in public for 20 years and shortly before she herself was returned to Dubai, Princess Latifa claimed in a video published on YouTube that her sister was being drugged. Princess Latifa has only appeared in public once since her abduction. She appeared dazed and confused. 

After the ruling, Sheikh Mohammed said in a statement that "as a head of government, I was not able to participate in the court’s fact-finding process. This has resulted in the release of a fact-finding judgment which inevitably only tells one side of the story." He asked media to respect his children's privacy. 

Sheikh Mohammed, who has been Dubai's leader since 2006, has an estimated wealth of $4 billion, according to Forbes, making him one of richest royals in the world. He is a major figure in horse racing and breeding and owns and operates two horse farms in Kentucky. Last year, he received a trophy from Queen Elizabeth II after one of his horses won a race at Royal Ascot.

He has an estimated 30 children with his six wives.

Princess Haya: Dubai ruler's wife, in hiding in London

Sheikh Mohammed is also prime minister of the United Arab Emirates.

He has portrayed his emirate as enlightened and Western-friendly.

One example: Dubai’s DAMAC Properties owns and operates the only Trump-branded golf club in the Middle East. Dubai has world-class infrastructure, luxury shopping malls, a skyscraper-filled skyline and a large expatriate population.

It also has a poor human rights record. 

Laws in the United Arab Emirates prioritizes men when it comes to marriage, divorce and custody of children. It still permits domestic violence. Princess Latifa wasn’t allowed to travel and study outside Dubai. A minder or male guardian trailed her everywhere. Princess Haya has been in hiding with her children in London for months. McFarlane noted in his ruling that while Sheikh Mohammed had denied all the allegations, his accounts relating to Princess Shamsa and Princess Latifa revealed that "he has not been open and honest with the court."

Sheikh Mohammed did not attend the proceedings. His ex-wife did.

"I have seen what has happened to their sisters and I can’t face the fact that the same might happen to them," Princess Haya told the court.

Tiina Jauhiainen, a Finnish citizen who helped Princess Latifa hatch her failed escape plan from Dubai and has since been fighting for her release, said in a WhatsApp message Friday she was "relived and happy" that details about Princess Haya's case could be publicly reported but also "saddened" because while the court concluded Princess Latifa was unlawfully kidnapped, "she is still being held against her will." 

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2020-03-06 10:36:56Z
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China Pushes Back as Coronavirus Crisis Damages Its Image - The New York Times

BEIJING — When the coronavirus epidemic began its relentless march around the world, China’s diplomats reacted harshly toward countries that shut their borders, canceled flights or otherwise restricted travel.

Italy was overreacting when it did so, Qin Gang, a vice minister of foreign affairs, told his counterpart in February. The United States was stoking fear and panic, a spokeswoman, Hua Chunying, said. “True feeling shines through in hardship,” she said back then.

Now China is doing the same, undercutting its own diplomatic efforts to win sympathy and support by imposing travel restrictions that it once called unnecessary. They include 14 days of quarantine for travelers from Italy, Iran, South Korea and Japan. Almost everyone flying into Beijing faces a similar fate, regardless of departure point.

“They have a toolbox that only seems to have a hammer,” said Jörg Wuttke, the president of the European Chamber of Commerce in China, who is now himself in quarantine in his Beijing home after returning from Europe last Friday.

The epidemic is first and foremost a public health crisis, having already caused more than 3,000 deaths, but for China, it has become a challenge to its standing at home and abroad, too. China faces a torrent of suspicion from other countries that could undermine its ambitions of becoming a global economic and political power.

China is now hitting back — it has expelled foreign journalists, attacked displays of racism, hinted that other governments are responding too slowly, and suggested that the virus originated elsewhere. The government has hailed friendly countries that sent supplies or stayed open to Chinese travelers and has also itself sent shipments of aid.

To the Communist Party’s critics, the epidemic has confirmed the harshest critiques of the flaws in its governance, including its intensifying authoritarianism under its leader, Xi Jinping, and its reflex for secrecy and obfuscation. With flights from around the world canceled, the near-isolation of the country could well compound the anger that has already boiled over at home, especially if the epidemic has a lasting effect on trade and tourism.

It has inflamed relationships that were already tense, like that with the United States, but also strained those with friendlier countries such as Russia. China has urged countries to work together, but lashed out at the United States and others, at least in part, it seems, to deflect public anger at home.

“The epidemic is a lost opportunity for China to rebuild some good will with America and other countries,” Susan L. Shirk, chairwoman of the 21st Century China Center at the University of California, San Diego, wrote in an email.

Get an informed guide to the global outbreak with our daily coronavirus newsletter.

“Beijing is playing geopolitics with the epidemic,” Ms. Shirk wrote. “The domestic propaganda is hostile to the U.S. and emphasizing the superiority of the Chinese system and the wisdom of Xi Jinping.”

The intensity of the outbreak forced China to go on the defensive early, especially as the government failed to explain the delays in warning the public about the threat of the coronavirus, especially in Wuhan, the city where it began.

“Well, this is a new virus,” China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, said in an interview with Reuters in February when asked about the delays. “So naturally it takes time for people to gain more understanding and knowledge about it. The same has happened in other countries.”

The epidemic has sparked a wave of xenophobia and anti-Chinese racism in Japan, Vietnam, Australia and countries in Europe and elsewhere, where some are asking if their economies are too dependent on China. Even Russia, which has grown closer and closer to Beijing, was among the first to shut its border and stop issuing visas, and China’s ambassador, Zhang Hanhui, complained about the treatment of Chinese on Moscow’s buses.

Around the world, the epidemic has been met with news coverage that questioned China’s public health standards, its one-party control and its suppression of dissent. Some Trump administration officials and members of Congress have argued that the crisis should force a more decisive reset in relations with China.

Chinese diplomats have pushed back. They attacked the displays of racist sentiment and, more broadly, tried to refute criticism of how the country has handled the outbreak.

China’s embassy in Berlin slammed the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel for a cover photograph that showed a man in a protective suit and mask, with the headline “Made in China.”

“Epidemic outbreaks must not be used as an excuse for discrimination and xenophobia,” the embassy’s statement said.

In the case of The Wall Street Journal, China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs went further, expelling three journalists from the newspaper’s Beijing bureau over a headline on an opinion-page essay: “China Is the Real Sick Man of Asia.”

The Trump administration retaliated this week by announcing that it would cap the number of Chinese employees in the United States at five major state media organizations, including Xinhua and CGTN. That, in turn, prompted new accusations of hypocrisy from Ms. Hua, the Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, and a hint of still more tit-for-tat moves. “Now the US kicked off the game,” she wrote on Twitter, “let’s play.”

Ms. Hua’s use of Twitter, which is blocked in China, is a feature of a newly aggressive form of public diplomacy that has taken shape in the last year — and that is being put to the test now. Where China’s diplomats have long stuck closely to scripted responses couched in protocol, she and some of her colleagues have pushed back against critics, at times combatively.

Another Foreign Ministry spokesman, Zhao Lijian, even gave some credence this week to suggestions swirling on the internet that the coronavirus did not come from China by saying no one yet knew the origin for sure.

“They are trying very hard to fight both the diplomatic damage the virus has caused and the domestic damage this has done to Xi Jinping,” said Xiao Qiang, a researcher at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley, and editor of China Digital Times.

Now that the rate of new infections and deaths in China has slowed, officials are trying to portray the country as the world’s leader in the fight against the coronavirus. The Central Propaganda Department is even publishing a book — in several languages — praising Mr. Xi’s role in guiding the country through the crisis, however premature a declaration of victory might seem at this point.

At a briefing in Beijing on Thursday, officials highlighted the assistance China is now providing other countries. That includes sending coronavirus test kits to Pakistan, Japan, Iran and other countries. China’s Red Cross flew a team of volunteer experts to Iran, which has been particularly hard hit. It also chartered a flight to bring back Chinese citizens from Iran — a step it harshly criticized the United States for doing from Wuhan in January.

China’s Foreign Ministry is keeping score. Ma Zhaoxu, a vice minister of foreign affairs, said on Thursday that 62 countries had donated masks or protective clothing.

Myanmar provided rice, Sri Lanka tea. Mongolia donated 30,000 sheep, a gift that coincided with an official visit last week by its president, Khaltmaagiin Battulga. (Mr. Battulga and his delegation returned to their country and went into quarantine as a precaution.)

Mr. Zhao, the ministry’s spokesman, noted that 170 leaders had made supportive statements. Officials also repeatedly cite remarks by senior officials of the World Health Organization, who have praised the country’s response.

Rush Doshi, director of the China Strategy Initiative at the Brookings Institution in Washington, said that China’s effort to rewrite the narrative — by donating test kits and sending other aid — could pay off.

“If they provide public goods, this is going a long away, and these narratives are meant to help to accelerate that process,” he said. “And I think they may be successful at it if they are really going to show in a big way they are on the ground in a place like Iran, making a difference.”

China could also benefit from the shift in focus to other hot spots, especially in Italy. Fernando Simón, the head of Spain’s coordination center for health alerts and emergencies, told a news conference that “we have to progressively think that China is not the highest risk zone.”

Others, though, are skeptical that China can easily rebound from the taint of the epidemic.

“Resentment against China in Europe is palpable,” Mr. Wuttke of the European Chamber of Commerce said. He then referred to Mr. Xi’s signature Belt and Road investment strategy to unite the world through infrastructure and commerce, saying that this was “not the Belt and Road people hoped for. Tragic.”

Reporting and research were contributed by Katrin Bennhold and Melissa Eddy in Berlin, Raphael Minder in Madrid, Farnaz Fassihi in New York, and Claire Fu in Beijing.

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2020-03-06 11:43:00Z
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Coronavirus Live Updates: Three U.S. States Declare Emergencies as Global Outbreak Nears 100,000 Cases - The New York Times

READ UPDATES IN CHINESE: 新冠病毒疫情最新消息

Here’s what you need to know:

Credit...Lee Jin-Man/Associated Press

As the global rate of infection surpassed 98,000 cases on Thursday, the world’s leading health official implored the international community to unleash the full power of their governments to combat the new coronavirus outbreak.

“This is not a drill,” said Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director general of the World Health Organization. “This is not a time for excuses. This is a time for pulling out all the stops.”

But around the world, governments have displayed signs of paralysis, obfuscation and a desire to protect their own interests, even as death tolls mounted and global capitals were so threatened by infection that politicians tested positive for the illness.

Instead of heeding Dr. Tedros’s advice that “now is the time to act,” countries pointed fingers at each other and complained about tit-for-tat travel restrictions. And citizens around the world, worried that their leaders were falling down on the job, took note and vented their anger.

In Japan, citizens have been outraged by the hands-off approach of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe as cases of the virus have continued to climb, even as testing has proceeded at a snail’s pace, leaving many fearful that a large number of infections are going undetected.

In China, residents of Wuhan who have been confined to their homes for weeks minced few words when the vice prime minister visited on Thursday. As the central government has crowed about a reduction in new cases, the people at the center of the outbreak who have most borne the brunt of the government’s initial cover-up, literally shouted from their windows: “Fake! Everything is fake!”

Americans scrambled to make plans after schools were abruptly closed in Washington State and New York City and struggled to make sense of conflicting information from President Trump and members of his own cabinet. Vice President Mike Pence who previously vowed that “any American could be tested,” on Thursday conceded that “we don’t have enough tests today to meet what we anticipate will be the demand going forward.”

By Friday morning, California, Maryland and Washington had declared emergencies.

In the meantime, the numbers have swelled, with the world on track to reach the grim milestone of 100,000 cases. By Thursday, officials reported more than 98,000 global cases of Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, and more than 3,280 deaths in at least 15 countries.

Coronavirus Map: Tracking the Spread of the Outbreak

The virus has infected more than 98,700 people in at least 83 countries.

Residents in Wuhan, the Chinese city at the center of the global outbreak, shouted complaints on Thursday from their balconies at visiting government officials, the latest sign of simmering anger in the locked-down city.

The rare rebuke of high-level officials was captured on video and circulated on social and state-run media. The visiting delegation included Sun Chunlan, a vice premier who is leading the central government’s response to the outbreak.

“Everything is fake!” shouted one resident, in a video clip that was shared on social media by People’s Daily, a state-run newspaper, which covered the government’s response to the heckling.

The videos taken on Thursday did not make clear the exact reason for residents’ dissatisfaction. People’s Daily said the accusations were aimed at local neighborhood officials who had “faked” deliveries of vegetables and meat to residents. Critics were skeptical of that explanation, seeing the response as an attempt by high-level officials to deflect blame for mishandling the crisis.

Wuhan and many other cities in Hubei Province, of which Wuhan is the capital, have been under strict lockdown since January. As the outbreak has escalated, many residents have voiced frustration with provincial and central government officials in Hubei and Beijing. Unable to leave their homes, many residents have had to rely on their neighborhood committees to organize deliveries of groceries and other basic essentials — a process that has been unevenly implemented across the city, much to the frustration of local residents.

On Thursday evening, CCTV, the state-run broadcaster, said that Ms. Sun had ordered local provincial and city officials to conduct an “in-depth investigation” in response to the “difficulties and problems reported by the masses at the scene.”

Get an informed guide to the global outbreak with our daily coronavirus newsletter.

It’s a complicated question for two reasons.

First, while knowledge of Covid-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, is growing every day, much remains unknown. Many cases are thought to be mild or asymptomatic, making it hard to gauge how wide the virus has spread or how deadly it is.

Second, much of the risk comes not from the virus itself but from how it affects the societies it hits.

For most people, the disease is probably not particularly deadly; health officials tend to put it somewhere within range of an unusually severe seasonal flu. Even in a global pandemic, it’s expected to kill fewer people than the flu virus. Data so far suggests that if you catch the coronavirus, you may be likelier to have no symptoms at all than to require hospitalization.

The coronavirus is thought to be much more dangerous for people over age 70 or with existing health conditions such as diabetes. This is also true of the flu.

But because the coronavirus spreads widely and quickly, it can overwhelm local health systems in a way that the flu does not.

This is thought to have driven the unusually high death rate in Hubei, the province in China where the coronavirus first spread. Officials, unprepared for the outbreak, were caught without sufficient hospital beds or health care workers, meaning that many people who might have survived with better care did not. In South Korea, where officials were better prepared, the death rate has been a fraction of that in Hubei — so far, about that of the flu.

It is also bringing disruptions that even the worst flu does not. Economic slowdowns, supply chain disruptions, school closures, public transit restrictions and mandatory work-from-home policies all exact tolls, whether you get sick or not.

A member of the French Parliament was placed in intensive care after testing positive for the virus, Richard Ferrand, the president of the National Assembly, said in a statement on Thursday without naming the lawmaker.

An employee at Parliament’s refreshment bar also tested positive for the virus, while another who works at the members’ restaurant was awaiting test results, Mr. Ferrand said.

“All lawmakers and staff have been informed of the situation this evening as well as of the action to be taken,” Mr. Ferrand said.

The announcement came as the number of cases surged across Europe and after France saw its biggest one-day jump in infections. France has reported more than 420 total infections and at least seven deaths.

The disease caused by the virus has hit the highest ranks of the Iranian government. The roster of current or former senior officials sickened in the outbreak includes a vice president, the deputy health minister who had been leading the coronavirus response and 23 members of Parliament. An adviser to Iran’s supreme leader and a diplomat have died from the virus, according to reports.

The number of confirmed cases in India rose to 31 on Friday, hours after schools were ordered closed in the capital, Delhi, a city of 19 million.

Delhi’s first case was recorded on Tuesday after a resident who had recently traveled to Italy returned last week. Panic was sparked after it was revealed that he had thrown a large birthday party for his child after his return.

By Thursday, the Delhi government ordered all public and private primary schools to close until the end of the month, forcing some two million students to stay home.

The virus is forcing many Indians to miss out on one of the country’s most important festivals, Holi. Prime Minister Narendra Modi took to Twitter this week to urge citizens to cancel their Holi gatherings and to practice social isolation more generally.

The Holi festival is celebrated across much of India. Entire neighborhoods come together to mark the festival and host large public parties, in which they share food and decorate each other’s faces with colorful powders.

One family in Delhi sent their regrets as they canceled their Holi party on Wednesday.

“Heeding health and medical counsel, with regret we have decided to call off our Holi celebrations,” the message read, before signing off, “with our best wishes for Holi and your good health.”

In neighboring Bhutan, the government announced Friday that it was sealing off its borders to all tourists for at least two weeks after a visitor from India tested positive for coronavirus. The case is the tiny mountain kingdom’s first.

South Korea voiced “strong regret” on Friday over Japan’s travel restrictions and warned of tit-for-tat retaliations, as tensions over the coronavirus threatened to aggravate already-fraught ties between Washington’s two key allies in Asia.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan imposed the restrictions on all visitors from South Korea and China, including a 14-day quarantine, on Friday as part of his government’s efforts to fight the coronavirus. Japan on Friday also voided visas for 2.8 million Chinese visitors.

South Korea reported 518 new cases on Friday, bringing the total number of patients to 6,284, the largest outbreak outside of China.

“We cannot understand Japan’s decision to take this unfair step without consulting with us in advance,” South Korea’s National Security Council said in a statement. “Our government decided to consider countermeasures based on the principle of reciprocity.”

The council criticized Japan’s “nontransparent and passive” way of fighting the coronavirus in contrast to South Korea’s “scientific and transparent” method of aggressively tracking and isolating infected people. It said Japan’s approach has spawned “mistrust in the international community.”

Although more than 90 countries have banned or restricted visitors from South Korea, Seoul became especially incensed by the move from Japan, a onetime rival.

Prime Minister Chung Se-kyun said Japan’s travel restrictions were tantamount to “full entry ban on our people.”

“We demand the excessive and irrational measure to be immediately withdrawn,” he told a government meeting on Friday.

Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha of South Korea summoned the Japanese ambassador, Koji Tomita, on Friday to protest Japan’s move and demand its withdrawal.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has been almost invisible for nearly a month as the coronavirus has threatened the health and economy of Japan.

Public health officials, not Mr. Abe, became the face of government ineptitude when a quarantine of a cruise ship led to hundreds of infections on board and the risk of further cases on shore. Those officials were left to explain why the government’s testing for the virus has been stuck at around 900 patients a day, even as neighboring countries test up to 10,000.

In the past week, a backlash from an angry and confused public has finally forced Mr. Abe to take more of a front-line role, but his efforts have only succeeded in deepening the biggest political crisis of his seven years in office.

Mr. Abe’s approval ratings have plummeted to the upper 30s in some polls. Last weekend, after he held his first news conference on the crisis — a scripted affair with prearranged questions that left Japanese journalists shouting at him for answers — Twitter was flooded with over a million posts demanding his resignation. Two days before, after weeks of inaction, he had blindsided parents by asking the nation’s schools to close for a month, sending many scrambling to find child care.

Vice President Mike Pence on Thursday pledged the full resources of the federal government to Washington State, as the death toll in the hardest-hit American state continued to rise.

Washington’s death toll from the coronavirus reached 13 on Thursday, driven by an outbreak at a nursing home in the Seattle suburbs, and the state’s overall number of infections rose to 75.

Eleven of the deaths have come at EvergreenHealth Medical Center in Kirkland, near where the nursing home is. The state has had one other person die at a different hospital and another die at home.

“Washington State is on the front lines of the coronavirus,” Mr. Pence said. Gov. Jay Inslee, a Democrat, praised Mr. Pence for his work assisting the state.

As government leaders in the region have taken escalating action to contain the crisis, public spaces in the region have emptied out. Seattle’s notorious traffic all but vanished, and the few cars on the highways raced along unimpeded.

Microsoft, Amazon, Ford Motor, CNN, Citigroup and Twitter have put employees through work-from-home drills, dusted off emergency-response plans and ordered increasingly stringent safety measures to protect their workers. Facebook, which disclosed that the coronavirus had been diagnosed in a contractor in its Seattle office, said that all employees in that city should work from home until March 31.

The same sense of urgency has spread to companies around the world as they deal with disruptions from the coronavirus outbreak that started in China.

Even so, the coronavirus has moved faster than their preparations. Amazon said this week that two employees in Europe, who had been in Milan, were infected with the virus and that one employee at its Seattle headquarters had tested positive for it. HSBC said on Thursday that the coronavirus had been diagnosed in an employee at its global headquarters in London. And AT&T said a retail employee at one of its stores in San Diego had tested positive.

The challenges faced by workplaces have become a new front in the battle over the coronavirus, which has spawned more than 90,000 cases and caused more than 3,000 deaths around the world. While factories in China had already been closed by the outbreak and are now just ramping back up, global white-collar companies have rarely grappled with this scale of disruption — or the level of fear that has gripped workers.

In the fight against the new coronavirus, China has deployed armies of medical workers, drones, draconian travel restrictions and invasive software to track the movement of its citizens.

Now a new weapon is being applied: Marxism.

In a new academic paper, two professors of Communist Party doctrine in northeast China write that “Marxist faith” is the “intrinsic force” that can defeat the virus, and that by uniting under Marxism, the Chinese people can “crush the devil epidemic.”

The paper, which surfaced online last week but has since been deleted from academic databases in China, has been widely mocked.

“Work of the great masters,” one user wrote sarcastically on Weibo, China’s Twitter-like social media service. Some internet users enthusiastically endorsed a call to send the authors of the paper to the front lines of the coronavirus epidemic in Wuhan as punishment.

The two authors, Liu Guojing and Liu Yawen of the Tourism College of Changchun University, could not be reached for comment.

Under China’s leader, Xi Jinping, the party has encouraged renewed devotion to the founding tenets of Communism, including Marxism. It was unclear why the paper was deleted from Chinese sites, though the authorities often move quickly to prevent criticism of the party and its ideology from spreading.

The number of confirmed cases of the new coronavirus in New York State doubled on Thursday to 22, with officials announcing two additional cases in New York City, eight new cases in Westchester County and one on Long Island.

The virus’s potential reach was underlined by a much larger number: As of Thursday morning, the city’s Department of Health was monitoring 2,773 New Yorkers currently in home isolation, most of them in self-quarantine.

Most of them had recently traveled to one of five countries where the outbreak has been most severe — China, Italy, Iran, South Korea or Japan — according to Dr. Oxiris Barbot, the city health commissioner.

At least two New Yorkers — a health care worker who has tested positive after visiting Iran and her husband, who tested negative — are under mandatory quarantine in their Manhattan home.

The eight new Westchester cases were all connected with a man from New Rochelle who is hospitalized, adding to eight that were found the day before. The two new New York City patients — a man in his 40s and a woman in her 80s — and the Long Island case, a 42-year-old man in Nassau County — were hospitalized after testing positive.

Reporting was contributed by Russell Goldman, Amy Qin, Elaine Yu, Javier C. Hernández, Max Fisher, Ben Dooley, Mike Isaac, David Yaffe-Bellany and Karen Weise.

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2020-03-06 10:11:00Z
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Live updates: Coronavirus fears reverberate as U.S. officials widen states of emergency; South Korea condemns Japan - The Washington Post

A prominent scholar involved in finding alternative remedies for coronavirus patients through the use of traditional Chinese medicine has predicted that new infections in Wuhan — the epicenter of China’s coronavirus outbreak — could fall to “near zero” by the end of March.

“Judging from the overall epidemic development … the new infections in Wuhan could hopefully be reduced to near zero by the end of March,” Professor Zhang Boli, who is president of Tianjin University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, told Communist Party mouthpiece People’s Daily this week.

“For other cities in Hubei province, the ‘near zero’ is expected to come in mid-March," Zhang said. "However, the near zero here is not an absolute value, and there could still be a few new infections occasionally.”

Zhang, an award-winning scholar known for his contribution to modernizing traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) and integrating TCM remedies with Western medicine, has led a team of 209 experts to treat mild cases of coronavirus pneumonia at a quarantine facility in Wuhan since Feb. 12.

China’s National Health Commission and National Administration of Traditional Chinese Medicine have recommended that TCM remedies can be used to help alleviate symptoms of coronavirus, although they note they likely do not cure the virus.

The 72-year-old internist expects that by the end of April, the Chinese would be able to eventually take off their face masks in public places. For Wuhan and the wider Hubei province, the no-mask moment would be at least one month later in May, he added.

“But personally, I don’t recommend removing masks too soon. People should continue to reduce gatherings, wash hands frequently, and keep a masks on a little bit longer,” Zhang said, pointing to a sustained risk of virus spread around the world.

Zhang’s team has also joined two hospitals in Wuhan in reducing reinfections and treating immunity disorder among newly discharged patients. China’s daily infections outside Hubei have fallen to double digits for nearly two weeks, compared with hundreds or even thousands of confirmed cases every day in early February.

On Friday, China reported 143 new infections, with only 17 of them being in provinces and regions outside Hubei.

“It is hard to say if the novel coronavirus would come to stay [as a chronic disease], because we now know so little about it,” Zhang said. “The impact on human society from coronavirus, however, is not going to end here and now."

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2020-03-06 07:53:00Z
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