Tag Archives: Coronavirus

Experts fear China reluctant to accept WHO ground mission

By Stephanie Nebehay

GENEVA (Reuters) – China is dragging its heels in accepting help on the ground from international health specialists, diplomats and experts said on Thursday, noting four days after a World Health Organization (WHO) advance team arrived in Beijing no details have been released on how and when the full mission will deploy.

China has recorded 48,206 cases of a new coronavirus, now known as SARS-CoV-2, which emerged in a seafood market in the central city of Wuhan in December. The virus has spread to 24 countries infecting more than 440 people, the WHO says.

Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO director-general, won a pledge from Chinese President Xi Jinping during his trip there two weeks ago that an international team would be able to help investigate the virus’ origin and spread.

An “advance team” of three experts, led by Dr. Bruce Aylward, a WHO official and public health emergency expert from Canada, as well as WHO’s Dr. Maria van Kerkhove, arrived in Beijing on Monday.

“Our advance team in China has made good progress in working out the composition of the team and the scope of its work. We hope to have more news to announce soon,” Tedros told reporters on Wednesday night.

He has said the full mission would include 10-15 experts, but has given no details of who they would be or when they would go to China.

The death toll in Hubei province, which includes Wuhan, leapt by a record 242 on Thursday to 1,310, with a sharp rise in confirmed cases after the adoption of new methodology for diagnosis, health officials said.

“It would obviously have been better if the (mission) team had arrived without delay,” a senior Western diplomat in Geneva told Reuters, though he added they could still do effective work with Chinese colleagues when they arrive.

“It’s just been very worrying and troubling and we are not seeing as much of a substantive and independent role that we would expect at this point,” he added.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said on Wednesday it had not yet been invited to send experts to China to assist with the WHO investigation.

“Not only was China very late in inviting international partners to help with the response, but we still only have a skeletal advance team in Beijing, and not Hubei province,” Lawrence Gostin, professor of global health law at Georgetown Law, told Reuters.

Gostin questioned whether Chinese authorities would accept experienced personnel from CDC – thereby setting aside “political and trade differences”.

“It appears that China has not accepted the U.S. offer of on the ground CDC experts, which is unfortunate. CDC has among the most experienced first responders,” he added.

Gostin voiced doubts that China would allow WHO experts to verify independently crucial information about the epidemic’s trajectory.

“Will they have complete access to epidemiologic, virologic real time data? Will they have the freedom to go into homes and communities…? Will they be full partners in surveillance and public health response?,” he said.

Xi said on Tuesday that China’s prevention and control work on the new coronavirus is having positive results, and the country will win the battle against the virus, state media reported.

WHO officials have said that Chinese authorities have been open and cooperative, sharing data throughout the outbreak.

(reporting by Stephanie Nebehay; editing by Alexandra Hudson)

Vietnam quarantines rural community of 10,000 because of coronavirus

Vietnam quarantines rural community of 10,000 because of coronavirus
By Phuong Nguyen

HANOI (Reuters) – Vietnam has quarantined a community of 10,000 people near the capital, Hanoi, for 20 days because of fears the coronavirus could spread there, two local officials told Reuters on Thursday.

The rural commune of Son Loi, in the northern Vietnameseprovince of Vinh Phuc, 44 km (27 miles) from Hanoi, is home to11 of the 16 coronavirus cases in the Southeast Asian country,including a three-month-old baby.

“Over 10,000 residents of the commune will not be permitted to leave for the next 20 days, starting from today,” the second of the two the officials told Reuters on Thursday.

“As of this evening, we will still allow those who wish to return home to enter but, in the next few days, this place will be totally be sealed,” the official told Reuters by phone.

Both officials declined to be identified citing the sensitivity of the situation.

The coronavirus arrived in Vinh Phuc after people from the province who had been in the central Chinese city of Wuhan, where the virus was first detected, returned home to Vietnam for the Lunar New Year holiday.

The province is home to factories operated by Japan’s Honda and Toyota.

On Wednesday, state media indicated that Vietnam’s Communist-ruled government could completely seal off the Son Loi commune.

On the same day, a Reuters photographer could see checkpoints manned by police and marked by coronavirus warning signs already in place outside Son Loi. People were still allowed to enter and leave the commune, which has a population of 10,641, according to official data.

Health officials wearing protective suits sprayed disinfectant on vehicles at the checkpoints. Local authorities have set up shops and provided food and face masks for residents there, the first official said.

“Everything is still under control,” said the official. “We are trying very hard to stop the virus spreading to other areas and provinces.”

Vietnam declared a public health emergency over the epidemic on Feb. 1 and banned all flights to and from China, where more than 1,300 people have died from the virus.

The southeast Asia country has made plans to quarantine hundreds of Vietnamese citizens returning from China, including 950 at military camps outside Hanoi, and another 900 at temporary facilities on the Vietnam-China border.

(Editing by John Stonestreet and Barbara Lewis)

Hunt on for ‘patient zero’ who spread coronavirus globally from Singapore

By John Geddie, Sangmi Cha and Kate Holton

SINGAPORE/SEOUL/LONDON (Reuters) – As lion dancers snaked between conference room tables laden with plastic bottles, pens, notebooks and laptops, some staff from British gas analytics firm Servomex snapped photos of the performance meant to bring good luck and fortune.

But the January sales meeting in a luxury Singapore hotel was far from auspicious.

Someone seated in the room, or in the vicinity of the hotel that is renowned for its central location and a racy nightclub in the basement, was about to take coronavirus global.

Three weeks later, global health authorities are still scrambling to work out who carried the disease into the mundane meeting of a firm selling gas meters, which then spread to five countries from South Korea to Spain, infecting over a dozen people.

Experts say finding this so-called “patient zero” is critical for tracing all those potentially exposed to infection and containing the outbreak, but as time passes, the harder it becomes.

“We do feel uncomfortable obviously when we diagnose a patient with the illness and we can’t work out where it came from…the containment activities are less effective,” said Dale Fisher, chair of the Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network coordinated by the World Health Organisation.

Authorities initially hinted at Chinese delegates, which included someone from Wuhan – the Chinese city at the epicentre of the virus that has killed over 1,350 people. But a Servomex spokesperson told Reuters its Chinese delegates had not tested positive.

Fisher and other experts have compared the Singapore meeting to another so-called “super-spreading” incident at a Hong Kong hotel in 2003 where a sick Chinese doctor spread Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome around the world.

The WHO has opened an investigation into the Singapore incident, but said its “way too early” to tell if it is a super-spreading event.

SCARY AND SOBERING

It was more than a week after the meeting – which according to a company e-mail included Servomex’s leadership team and global sales staff – that the first case surfaced in Malaysia.

The incubation period for the disease is up to 14 days and people may be able to infect others before symptoms appear.

The firm said it immediately adopted “extensive measures” to contain the virus and protect employees and the wider community. Those included self-isolation for all 109 attendees, of whom 94 were from overseas and had left Singapore.

But the virus kept spreading.

Two South Korean delegates fell sick after sharing a buffet meal with the Malaysian, who also passed the infection to his sister and mother-in-law. Three of the firm’s Singapore attendees also tested positive.

Then cases started appearing in Europe.

An infected British delegate had headed from the conference to a French ski resort, where another five people fell ill. Another linked case then emerged in Spain, and when the Briton returned to his home town in the south of England the virus spread further.

“It feels really scary that one minute it’s a story in China… and then the next minute it is literally on our doorstep,” said Natalie Brown, whose children went to the same school as the British carrier. The school said in a letter that two people at the school had been isolated.

“It’s scary and sobering how quickly it seems to have spread,” said Brown.

TIME RUNNING OUT

Back in Singapore, authorities were battling to keep track of new cases of local transmissions, many unlinked to previous cases.

Management at the hotel – the Grand Hyatt Singapore – said they had cleaned extensively and were monitoring staff and guests for infection but did not know “how, where or when” conference attendees were infected. The lion dancers, who posted photos of the event on Facebook, said they were virus free.

“Everyone assumes it was a delegate but it could have been a cleaner, it could have been a waiter,” said Paul Tambyah, an infectious diseases expert at National University Singapore. He added it was “very important” to find “patient zero” to establish other possible “chains of transmission”.

But time may be running out.

Singapore health ministry’s Kenneth Mak said the government will continue to try and identify the initial carrier until the outbreak ends, but as days pass it will get harder.

“We might never be able to tell who that first patient is,” Mak said.

Meanwhile, the fallout from the conference continues to sow trepidation weeks after the event and thousands of miles away.

Reuters visited Servomex’s offices in the suburbs of South Korea’s capital, Seoul. It was closed and dark inside, and a building guard told Reuters employees were working from home.

A notice posted by building management stated a coronavirus patient had entered the complex, while several young women could be overheard in a nearby elevator discussing whether it had been used by the infected person.

“Do you think the patient would have gotten on this elevator or the other one?” one said.

(Reporting by John Geddie, Joe Brock and Keith Zhai in Singapore, Sangmi Cha and Josh Smith in Seoul, Kate Holton in London, and Joseph Sipalan in Kuala Lumpur; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan)

Japan records first coronavirus death, two taxi drivers test positive

By Rocky Swift and Elaine Lies

TOKYO (Reuters) – A woman has died from the coronavirus in Japan, the first such death in the country since the epidemic spread from China, the health minister said on Thursday.

Two taxi drivers, one of them in the capital Tokyo, have also tested positive, raising the possibility that it could be passed on through their passengers.

For a graphic tracking the spread of the coronavirus from China, click here

On the Diamond Princess cruise liner quarantined in the port of Yokohama, 44 new cases were confirmed.

But in some good news for the 3,500-odd passengers and crew who have been stuck onboard since Feb. 3, Japan said it would allow some elderly people who have tested negative for the coronavirus to disembark ahead of schedule.

Japan is of the countries worst affected by the epidemic outside China, with 251 confirmed cases, including those on the Diamond Princess.

Health Minister Katsunobu Kato told a news conference on Thursday that a woman in her 80s living in Kanagawa prefecture, which borders Tokyo, had died. She was the first fatality in Japan, and the third outside mainland China.

The woman fell ill in January but only later showed symptoms of pneumonia and was hospitalised, then transferred to another hospital when her condition worsened.

Her infection with the coronavirus confirmed after her death, Kato said. The route of contagion was being investigated.

The minister also confirmed that a Tokyo taxi driver in his 70s had tested positive for the virus, along with a doctor in central Japan. A third person, also a taxi driver, in Chiba just east of Tokyo has also tested positive.

Kato announced earlier on Thursday that elderly passengers on the Diamond Princess who have pre-existing conditions or are in windowless rooms would be allowed to leave starting from Friday, rather than the originally targeted date of Feb. 19. They will complete their quarantine onshore.

The liner was quarantined on arrival in Yokohama, near Tokyo, on Feb. 3 after a man who disembarked in Hong Kong before it travelled to Japan was diagnosed with the virus that has now killed more than 1,350 people in mainland China.

About 80% of the ship’s passengers were aged 60 or over, with 215 in their 80s and 11 in their 90s, according to Japanese media. The ship, managed by Princess Cruise Lines and owned by Miami-based Carnival Corp, typically has a crew of 1,100 and a passenger capacity of 2,670.

The additional 44 cases included 43 passengers and one crew member, Kyodo news agency said. With the number of those infected on the cruise ship now up to 218 plus one quarantine officer, concerns have been raised about conditions on the ship.

Brandon Brown, a health expert at the University of California, said that despite some passengers’ concerns, recycled air on the ship did not pose a risk.

“The more likely explanation for the spread of infection during quarantine on the ship is the high passenger interaction due to close quarters and limited personal space on any cruise ship,” Brown said.

Indian media aired videos in which Indian crew members said they were working in close quarters and appealed for help from Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

A health ministry official could not confirm how many of those infected so far on the ship were crew.

OLYMPICS CONCERNS

Also on Thursday, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said the cabinet would decide on Friday on spending 10.3 billion yen ($95 million) from the budget reserve to respond to the coronavirus.

Tokyo 2020 Olympics President Yoshiro Mori repeated that the Summer Olympics due to held in the capital from July 24 would go ahead as planned.

“I would like to clearly reiterate that cancellation or postponement of the Tokyo Games are not being considered,” he said at the start of a meeting with International Olympic Committee Coordination Commission Chief John Coates.

(Additional reporting by Antoni Slodkowski, Kiyoshi Takenaka and Elaine Lies; Writing by Linda Sieg and Elaine Lies; Editing by Angus MacSwan)

Coronavirus deaths, cases leap in China; markets shiver

By Winni Zhou and Dominique Patton

BEIJING (Reuters) – The Chinese province at the epicentre of the coronavirus outbreak reported a record rise in deaths and thousands more cases on Thursday under a new diagnostic method, raising fresh questions about the scale of the crisis.

The sharp rise in the headline number of deaths and infections unnerved world markets, as traders halted a recent rally in stocks and retreated back to the safety of government bonds and gold.

Health officials in China’s central province of Hubei said 242 people had died from the flu-like virus on Wednesday, the fastest rise in the daily count since the pathogen was identified in December.

That took total deaths in China from the newly discovered virus to 1,367, up 254 from the previous day, the National Health Commission said.

For all related coverage on the outbreak, click: https://www.reuters.com/live-events/coronavirus-6-id2921484

For related Reuters graphics on the new coronavirus, click: https://tmsnrt.rs/2GVwIyw

The spike in numbers came a day after markets were cheered when China reported its lowest number of new cases in two weeks, bolstering a forecast by the country’s senior medical adviser that the epidemic could end by April.

Hubei had previously only allowed infections to be confirmed by RNA tests, which can take days to process. RNA, or ribonucleic acid, carries genetic information allowing for identification of organisms like viruses.

But it has begun using quicker computerised tomography (CT) scans, which reveal lung infections, the Hubei health commission said, to confirm virus cases and isolate them faster.

As a result, another new 14,840 cases were reported in the central 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.

About 60,000 people have now been confirmed to have the virus, the vast majority of them in China.

The new diagnostic procedure could explain the spike in deaths, said Raina McIntyre, head of biosecurity research at the Kirby Institute at the University of New South Wales.

“Presumably, there are deaths which occurred in people who did not have a lab diagnosis but did have a CT,” she told Reuters. “It is important that these also be counted.”

The new testing is only being used in Hubei, officials said.

TENTATIVE SLOWING?

Under the new system, suspected cases were being confirmed, and if the number of deaths did not rise as fast, that would mean the disease was less deadly than thought, said Dr Eyal Leshem of the Tel Aviv University School of Medicine.

“The real mortality rate of the disease may be lower,” Leshem said.

Consultancy Capital Economics said the surge did not necessarily point to an acceleration in the spread of the virus but rather that official figures had been understating its prevalence.

“For now, the latest figures don’t appear to undermine the recent tentative signs that the spread of the virus may be slowing,” it said.

Frank Benzimara, head of Asia Equity Strategy, at Society Generale in Hong Kong, said the new figures had not sparked panic in financial markets: “It can be seen as an exercise of transparency.”

The outbreak, which is believed to have emerged late last year from a market in Wuhan where wildlife was traded illegally, is one of the biggest tests facing the Chinese government in years and blame has fallen on provincial leaders.

State media said provincial Communist Party boss Jiang Chaoliang had been sacked as secretary of the Hubei Provincial Committee, and Ma Guoqiang had been removed as party chief in the provincial capital Wuhan.

CRUISE TO CAMBODIA

Media did not give a reason for the dismissals, but the two are the most high-profile officials to be removed from duty since the outbreak began.

The World Health Organization (WHO) said on Wednesday the number of infections in China had stabilised but it was too early to say the epidemic was slowing.

Chinese scientists are testing two antiviral drugs and preliminary clinical trial results are weeks away, but a vaccine could take 18 months to develop.

Hundreds of infections have been reported in more than two dozen other countries and territories, but only two people have died from the virus outside mainland China – one in Hong Kong and one in the Philippines.

The biggest cluster of cases outside China is on a cruise ship quarantined off the Japanese port of Yokohama, where a further 44 cases were reported on Thursday. In all, 219 of about 3,700 people on board have tested positive.

There was a happy ending for another cruise ship, the MS Westerdam, which docked in Cambodia after being denied docking rights in Guam, Japan, the Philippines, Taiwan and Thailand over fears that one of its 1,455 passengers and 802 crew might have the virus, even though none had tested positive.

Wuhan, a city of 11 million people, remains under virtual lockdown, and other major Chinese cities face severe restrictions.

(Reporting by Winnie Zhou Yawen Chen and Dominique Patton in Beijing; Brenda Goh, Josh Horwitz and David Stanway in Shanghai; Keith Zhai, d John Geddie, tom Westbrook in Singapore; James Pearson in Hanoi, Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva; Writing by Stephen Coates and Robert Birsel; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan and Clarence Fernandez)

U.S. CDC says not yet invited to assist with coronavirus investigation in China

(Reuters) – The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said on Wednesday it had not yet been invited to send in experts to assist with the investigation of the coronavirus outbreak that has killed over 1,000 people.

An advance team of World Health Organization medical experts arrived in China on Monday to help investigate the outbreak, and the United States has been waiting for approval to send its experts as part of the WHO team.

(Reporting by Saumya Sibi Joseph in Bengaluru; Editing by Shinjini Ganguli)

Japan cruise ship coronavirus cases climb to 175, including quarantine officer

By Ju-min Park and Elaine Lies

TOKYO (Reuters) – Another 39 people have tested positive for the coronavirus on the Diamond Princess cruise ship quarantined in Japan, with one quarantine officer also infected, bringing the total to 175, the health ministry said on Wednesday.

The Diamond Princess was placed in quarantine for two weeks on arriving in Yokohama, south of Tokyo, on Feb. 3, after a man who disembarked in Hong Kong was diagnosed with the virus.

The epidemic originated in mainland China, where more than 1,100 people have now died of the virus.

It is looking like an increasing economic threat for Japan, where manufacturers are reliant on Chinese companies for parts, and shops and hotels dependent on Chinese tourists.

About 3,700 people are on board the cruise ship, which usually has a crew of 1,100 and a passenger capacity of 2,670. Health Minister Katsunobu Kato said in parliament that he wanted to expand testing to all passengers and crew on board, and that authorities could muster resources to do more than 1,000 tests a day, according to national broadcaster NHK.

The British-flagged Diamond Princess is managed by Princess Cruise Lines, one of the world’s largest cruise lines and a unit of Carnival Corp <CCL.N>.

Kyodo news agency, citing the health ministry, said that of the 39 cases, 10 were crew and 29 were passengers.

Ten were Japanese nationals and the others were from 11 countries, including the United States and China. Four were in serious condition, Kato said.

People who test positive for the virus are taken off the ship to hospital.

The quarantine officer who was infected had been handing out questionnaires checking the health of passengers and crew and had been following rules that require the wearing of a mask and gloves but not a full protective suit, according to the Nikkei business daily, quoting the health ministry.

A health ministry official had no immediate comment, but Nikkei said the ministry was checking the officer’s contacts with colleagues and family members.

The government has decided on a 500 billion yen ($4.5 billion) emergency package of loans and guarantees to help small businesses, particularly in tourism and smaller manufacturers, the Nikkei newspaper reported.

S&P Global Ratings said the outbreak would likely damage the operating performance of Japanese companies in the first half, especially automobile manufacturers that are likely to face a prolonged halt in operations in China.

“The impact might be harsh on Nissan Motor and Honda Motor,” the rating agency said in a note.

About 80% of the ship passengers were aged 60 or over, with 215 in their 80s and 11 in the 90s, the Japan Times newspaper reported.

Japan has sent four chartered flights to China’s Hubei province, the epicenter of the outbreak, for its citizens there to return, and plans a fifth. The 197 people who returned on the first chartered flight tested negative, the health ministry said.

 

(Reporting by Chris Gallagher, Ju-min Park, Ami Miyazaki, Elaine Lies and David Dolan; Writing by Linda Sieg; Editing by Kenneth Maxwell, Gerry Doyle, Raju Gopalakrishnan and Nick Macfie)

China’s new coronavirus cases drop, world still scared

By Ryan Woo and John Geddie

BEIJING/SINGAPORE (Reuters) – China reported on Wednesday its lowest number of new coronavirus cases in two weeks, bolstering a forecast by Beijing’s senior medical adviser for the outbreak in the country to end by April – but fears of further international spread remained.

The 2,015 new confirmed cases took China’s total to 44,653. That was the lowest daily rise since Jan. 30 and came a day after epidemiologist Zhong Nanshan said the epidemic should peak in China this month before subsiding.

His comments gave some balm to public fears and to markets, where global stocks surged to record highs on hopes of an end to disruption in the world’s second largest economy.

But the World Health Organization (WHO) has likened the epidemic’s threat to terrorism and one expert said that while it may be peaking in China, this was not the case beyond.

A man wearing a face mask rides a subway, following an outbreak of the novel coronavirus, in Beijing, China February 12, 2020. REUTERS/Tingshu Wang

“It has spread to other places where it’s the beginning of the outbreak,” Dale Fisher, head of the Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network coordinated by the WHO, said in an interview in Singapore. “In Singapore, we are at the beginning.”

Singapore has 50 cases, including one found at its biggest bank, DBS <DBSM.SI>, on Wednesday that caused an evacuation at head office.

Hundreds of infections have been reported in dozens of other countries and territories, but only two people have died outside mainland China: one in Hong Kong and another in the Philippines.

China’s latest figures also showed that the number of deaths on the mainland rose by 97 to 1,113 by the end of Tuesday.

But doubts have been aired on social media about how reliable the data is, after the government last week amended guidelines on classification.

 

QUARANTINED CRUISES

The biggest cluster outside China is on a cruise ship quarantined off Japan’s Yokohama port, with about 3,700 people on board, of whom 175 have tested positive.

There was a happy ending in sight for another cruise ship, the MS Westerdam, which Thailand, Japan, Taiwan, Guam and the Philippines had refused to let dock over fears one of its 1,455 passengers and 802 crew may have the virus.

Cambodia finally agreed to let it land, the Holland America Line said. Passengers have been whiling away time playing chess and doing puzzles.

“The staff has tried to bolster spirits but you can only play so many games of trivia,” American passenger Angela Jones told Reuters in a video. “I’ve asked others who say they are napping a lot”.

China’s state news agency Xinhua called the epidemic a “battle that has no gunpowder smoke” and chided some officials for “dropping the ball” in some places.

There was no lack of zeal, however, in the city of Chongqing where prosecutors brought charges against a man who strapped on firecrackers, doused himself with gasoline and held up a lighter to defy a ban on public gatherings.

He had planned a birthday banquet, Xinhua said.

The outbreak has been named COVID-19 – CO for corona, VI for virus, D for disease and 19 for the year that it emerged. It is suspected to have originated in a market illegally trading wildlife in Hubei province’s capital of Wuhan in December.

The city of 11 million people remains under virtual lockdown as part of China’s unprecedented measures to seal infected regions and limit transmission routes.

‘RACIST REPORTING’?

Moves by Washington and others to curb visitors from China have offended Beijing, which says they are an over-reaction.

Anti-Chinese sentiment has also reared on social media.

A Xinhua commentary chided some Western media for “racist reporting” on the coronavirus and ignoring “the unswerving efforts and huge sacrifice China and its people have made”.

“Just as the H1N1 influenza outbreak in the United States in 2009 should not be called an ‘American virus’, the NCP (novel coronavirus pneumonia) is neither a ‘China virus’ nor ‘Wuhan virus’,” it said, in a reference to the 2009 swine flu pandemic.

With companies laying off workers and supply chains disrupted from the car industry to smartphones, China’s economy is taking a big hit. ANZ Bank said first quarter growth may slow to between 3.2-4.0%, down from a projection of 5.0%.

However, the troubles were also triggering innovation.

One company in southwestern China built a tunnel to spray employees with disinfectant, while a steamed bun shop in Beijing is using a wooden board to serve customers and avoid contact.

The latest big event to be cancelled was Formula One’s Chinese Grand Prix, originally set for Shanghai on April 19.

Organisers of a global mobile conference in Barcelona were also mulling whether to pull the plug, two sources said, after several European telecom companies pulled out due to the coronavirus.

(Reporting by Ryan Woo, Huizhong Wu, Stella Qiu, Judy Hua, Kevin Yao, Zhang Min, Dominique Patton, Se Young Lee, Gabriel Crossley, Colin Qian, Roxanne Liu in Beijing; Brenda Goh, Josh Horwitz in Shanghai; Keith Zhai and John Geddie in Singapore; Stephanie Nebehay and Emma Farge in Geneva; Kay Johnson in Baghdad; Abhishek Takle in Baku; Isla Binnie in Madrid; Writing by Robert Birsel and Andrew Cawthorne; Editing by Clarence Fernandez, Timothy Heritage and Alex Richardson)

Nearly 200 Americans evacuated from China set to be freed from quarantine

(Reuters) – Nearly 200 Americans evacuated from the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak in China could be released from quarantine at a U.S. Air Force base in California on Tuesday after 14 days, a leading U.S. health official said.

The first group of U.S. citizens to be evacuated from the coronavirus-stricken Chinese city of Wuhan are mostly U.S. State Department employees and their families. They were flown by government-chartered cargo jet to March Air Reserve Base in Riverside County about 60 miles (97 km) east of Los Angeles.

“They are being assessed to make sure they remain symptom-free and we hope they’ll be released to travel home today,” Dr. Anne Schuchat, principal deputy director for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), told a news conference at the National Press Club in Washington.

The fast-spreading virus has killed more than 1,000 people in China, where there have been nearly 43,000 cases. There have been another 319 confirmed cases in 24 other countries, including 13 in the United States.

The 195 people arrived in the United States on Jan. 29 and their quarantine expires on Tuesday. On Feb. 5, two more planes carrying about 350 Americans out of Wuhan arrived at two other military base in California and are subjected to 14-day quarantines.

The first group was limited to a fenced quarantine area on the base, where only official medical staff were allowed to enter. However, employees at the base including uniformed airmen have been accosted out of unfounded fears that they were at increased risk of exposure, a local health official said.

“There have been comments made that have been hurtful – both in person and on social media – that are often based on incorrect or incomplete information,” Cameron Kaiser, the public health officer for Riverside County, said in an open letter to the public on Monday.

“A few base workers have even been accosted in uniform. This is not acceptable, and needs to stop,” Kaiser said.

As of Monday, none had reported positive for the coronavirus, and all of those who have not developed symptoms will be allowed to leave, Kaiser said. Only two people developed symptoms and both retested negative, he said.

The United States has also authorized the voluntary departure of U.S. government employees and their relatives from Hong Kong, the State Department said on Tuesday.

The authorization was made “out of an abundance of caution related to uncertainties associated” with the disease, according to a department spokesperson.

(Reporting by Michael Erman, Manas Mishra, Lisa Lambert and Daniel Trotta; Editing by Bill Berkrot)

Fed says risks to economy easing, but calls out coronavirus in report to Congress

By Howard Schneider and Lindsay Dunsmuir

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A “moderately” expanding U.S. economy was slowed last year by a manufacturing slump and weak global growth, but key risks have receded and the likelihood of recession has declined, the U.S. Federal Reserve reported in its latest monetary policy report to the U.S. Congress.

“Downside risks to the U.S. outlook seem to have receded in the latter part of the year, as the conflicts over trade policy diminished somewhat, economic growth abroad showed signs of stabilizing, and financial conditions eased,” the Fed said, noting that the U.S. job market and consumer spending remained strong.

“The likelihood of a recession occurring over the next year has fallen noticeably in recent months.”

Among the risks the Fed did note: the fallout from the spreading outbreak of coronavirus in China, “elevated” asset values, and near-record levels of low-grade corporate debt that the Fed fears could become a problem in an economic downturn.

Overall, however, the Fed saw risks to a more than decade long U.S. recovery easing following its three interest rate cuts in 2019, and evidence that “the global slowdown in manufacturing and trade appears to be at an end, and consumer spending and services activity around the world continue to hold up.”

It cautioned that “the recent emergence of the coronavirus, however, could lead to disruptions in China that spill over to the rest of the global economy.”

By law the Fed twice a year prepares a formal report for the U.S. Congress on the state of the economy and monetary policy.

Much of its amounts to a review of recent events. The new document repeats the Fed’s assessment that the current level of the federal funds rate, in a range of between 1.5% and 1.75% was “appropriate” to keep the recovery track.

It also reviewed the spike in the federal funds rate last fall and the steps the Fed has taken to relieve funding pressures, repeating it considers the measures technical and not a change in monetary policy.

Fed Chair Jerome Powell will present the report at two public hearings next week, and some Democratic U.S. senators have already posed in writing a series of questions challenging the Fed’s actions in those short-term funding markets.

The document did include a separate section analyzing how a slump in manufacturing last year impacted economic growth overall, after concern a downturn in that sector might pull the United States into a recession.

The Fed concluded that the slowdown in factory output, which also meant less business for parts and services suppliers, cut overall growth in gross domestic product between 0.2 and 0.5 percentage points.

That falls “well short” of the threshold associated with past recessions, the Fed said.

(Reporting by Howard Schneider and Lindsay Dunsmuir; Editing by Andrea Ricci)