With more than 1,000 deaths and over 42,000 known cases, new coronavirus named 'COVID-19' has sparked evacuations, lockdowns and a global scare. Apart from mainland China, over 300 cases were reported in at least 24 other countries and regions, according to the World Health Organization (WHO) and Chinese health officials.
The Chinese government has virtually locked down the central province of Hubei, home to 60 million people, and it's capital Wuhan. China is facing mounting isolation as airlines suspend flights to its cities. Many countries have evacuated their citizens from Hubei and are putting them in quarantine or isolation upon return.
While most people infected with the virus recover quickly with only mild symptoms, the coronavirus COVID-19 can lead to pneumonia and other severe respiratory illnesses. It is still too early to know what its death rate will be since there are likely to be many cases of milder disease going undetected.
There is no vaccine for the virus yet.
Symptoms
Symptoms can include fever, cough, shortness of breath. The symptoms of COVID-19 are believed to appear in as few as 2 days or as long as 14 after exposure.
US President Donald Trump will seek $2.5 billion from Congress to fight the coronavirus epidemic and US and South Korean militaries are considering scaling back joint training as the virus spreads in Europe and the Middle East.
Countries around the world are stepping up efforts to prevent a pandemic of the flu-like virus that originated from China late last year and has now infected more than 80,000 people, 10 times more cases than the SARS coronavirus.
The White House said more than $1 billion of the requested virus budget would go toward developing a vaccine, while other funds would be used for therapeutics and the stockpiling of personal protective equipment such as masks.
A fourth person infected with the coronavirus has died in Italy, officials said on Monday as the government struggled to contain an outbreak of the illness. More than 200 people have come down with the virus since Friday, the latest data showed, the vast majority of them in the wealthy northern regions of Lombardy and Veneto.
Looking to slow the progress of the highly contagious disease, authorities in the worst-hit areas have shut schools, universities, museums, and cinemas, and banned all public events. Almost a dozen towns in Lombardy southeast of Italy's financial capital Milan, with a combined population of nearly 50,000 have been placed under effective quarantine, with similar measures in place for a small town in neighboring Veneto.
An announcement that the Chinese city of Wuhan would relax some of its travel restrictions and allow some people to leave was made without authorization and has been revoked, the local government said on Monday.
The city at the epicenter of a coronavirus outbreak that has already killed more than 2,500 people said it would continue to impose strict controls over its borders in order to prevent the virus from spreading further.
It said it had reprimanded the people responsible for the earlier announcement that healthy people would be allowed to leave if they had vital business.
China's coronavirus outbreak showed no sign of peaking with health authorities on Friday reporting more than 5,000 new cases. In its latest update, China's National Health Commission said it had recorded 121 new deaths and 5,090 new coronavirus cases on the mainland on Feb. 13, taking the accumulated total infected to 63,851 people. Some 55,748 people are currently undergoing treatment, while 1,380 people have died of the flu-like virus.
The latest toll takes account of some deaths that had been double-counted in Hubei, the health commission said.
Singapore's economy could enter recession due to the blow from the coronavirus outbreak, its prime minister said on Friday, adding that the city-state was bracing for a "significant" hit in the coming quarters. "The impact will be significant at least in the next couple of quarters. It is a very intense outbreak," Lee Hsien Loong said in a video interview posted on his Facebook page.
"I can't say whether we will have a recession or not. It's possible, but definitely our economy will take a hit," Lee said in remarks made to media at Singapore's main Changi airport. Lee said business at the airport had suffered with flights down by a third.
The first group of French nationals repatriated from China due to the coronavirus outbreak returned to the outside world on Friday after two weeks in quarantine. None of the 181 involved - who had been flown home from Wuhan, the epicenter of the epidemic - tested positive for the virus, local health officials said.
A further 157 people remain in quarantine in southern France, of whom 122 will be allowed home on Feb. 16 and the remainder on Feb. 23. France has recorded 11 cases of the virus.
Vietnam has quarantined a community of 10,000 people near the capital, Hanoi, for 20 days over fears that the coronavirus could spread there, two local officials said on Thursday.
The rural commune of Son Loi, in the northern Vietnamese province of Vinh Phuc, 44 km (27 miles) from Hanoi, is home to 11 of the 16 coronavirus cases in the Southeast Asian country, including a three-month-old baby.
Chinese scientists are testing two antiviral drugs against the new coronavirus and preliminary clinical trial results are weeks away, the co-chair of a World Health Organization (WHO) meeting said on Wednesday.
In Hubei province, in central China, officials said 242 people died on Wednesday, the biggest daily rise since the flu-like virus emerged in the provincial capital Wuhan in December. Total deaths in China are 1,367.
The rise, following a forecast earlier this week by China's senior medical adviser that the epidemic may end there by April, halted a global stocks rally. But it appeared in large part to be due to methodology.
Hubei had previously only allowed infections to be confirmed by RNA tests, which can take days. RNA, or ribonucleic acid, carries genetic information allowing identification of viruses. But it has also begun using computerized tomography (CT) scans, which give images of the lungs, the Hubei health commission said, to identify cases and isolate them faster.
As a result, another 14,840 new cases were reported in the province on Thursday, from 2,015 new cases nationwide a day earlier. But excluding cases confirmed using the new methods, the number of new cases rose by only 1,508.
Russia on Wednesday discharged its second patient who caught the new coronavirus, giving him a clean bill of health and a box of vitamins after treatment in Siberia. "Today he is completely healthy and is not a danger to the public," the chief doctor of the Chita infection hospital, Sergei Yurchuk, said in a statement from regional health authorities. "We are presenting him with vitamins and urge him to be more attentive to his health and not fall ill any more," he said.
So far only two confirmed cases of infection with the COVID-19 virus have been reported in Russia, consumer watchdog Rospotrebnadzor said Tuesday. Both were Chinese nationals.
A female Chinese student was discharged on Tuesday, with a gift of balloons from her doctors in a hospital in Tyumen. In both cases, the infection was mild, Russian doctors said. People who were in contact with the two patients are still under quarantine.
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