Deaths in China Rise, With No Sign of Slowdown

The first evacuees were flown from Wuhan on Jan. 29, and their plane stopped in Anchorage to refuel and for the passengers to be given initial screenings. The Boeing 747 then continued on to March Air Reserve Base in Riverside, Calif.

Britain and France urged their citizens to leave China.

Britain and France intensified warnings to their citizens in China on Tuesday, urging all who could do so to vacate the mainland to minimize the risk of infection.

The Foreign Office also advised “against all travel” to Hubei Province, the epicenter of the outbreak, and “against all but essential travel to the rest of mainland China.” It made exceptions for Hong Kong and Macau.

“Where there are still British nationals in Hubei Province who wish to be evacuated, we will continue to work around the clock to facilitate this,” said Britain’s foreign secretary, Dominic Raab.

France’s Foreign Ministry issued a similar warning.

In Britain, at least, the government faced criticism for saying little about why it had escalated its warnings, leaving some Britons in China feeling anxious and confused.

Emily Thornberry, the opposition Labour Party’s spokeswoman on foreign affairs, accused the government of abandoning British citizens in China. “From the very start of this outbreak, the government’s response has been a total shambles,” she said.

Hyundai suspended production at South Korea car factories.

Hyundai, which relies on auto parts from China, said in a statement that it had “decided to suspend its production lines from operating at its plants in Korea. The decision is due to disruptions in the supply of parts resulting from the coronavirus outbreak in China.”

Many auto plants in China have shut down because of the virus, including factories run by Hyundai, Tesla, Ford and Nissan. Hyundai plants in South Korea would be the first to shut down lines outside China.

“The company is reviewing various measures to minimize the disruption of its operations, including seeking alternative suppliers in other regions,” a Hyundai spokesman said in an email.

Hyundai has a worldwide network of factories, including plants in Russia, Turkey, the Czech Republic and Montgomery, Ala., which can probably make up for lost production in Korea.

But the shutdown of some production at its Korean plants may signal further disruptions at manufacturers that depend on parts from China. The longer that Chinese factories remain shut down, the greater the risk of shortages of key components.

The oil industry is already in the doldrums.

Oil and natural gas producers have been suffering from low commodity prices for the past year and now expect a sharp drop in global prices for their products. As a result, they are preparing to slash investments in exploration and production.

The price of West Texas intermediate crude, a key benchmark, fell below $50 on Monday, a 20 percent decline in less than a month. After recovering slightly Tuesday morning, the price fell further.

Just a few weeks after the outbreak of the virus, daily Chinese oil demand is already down 20 percent because of dwindling air travel, road transportation and manufacturing.

China buys only about 200,000 barrels a day of oil and refined transportation fuels from the United States, out of 8.5 million barrels of total daily American exports. But oil is a global commodity, and benchmark prices are set on world markets, not domestically. Lower prices mean lower profits.

“It’s a blow,” said Steven Pruett, chief executive of Elevation Resources.

‘The virus is the enemy, not the Chinese.’

But Mr. Huang, a veteran diplomat, also criticized what he described as an overreaction by the American government in severely restricting travel to and from China. He singled out in particular the decision to evacuate the American Consulate in Wuhan, the city of 11 million in Hubei where the outbreak was first detected.

“I personally don’t quite get it,” Mr. Huang said at a news conference at the Chinese Consulate in Manhattan. “It’s not the practice of Chinese diplomats. I myself did a few evacuations, and at a difficult time of something like that, the diplomats of China would be sent in, rather than pulling out, because you might get people there who need you.”

Mr. Huang, whose consular operations cover 10 states where 130,000 Chinese students are enrolled in universities, also said he had no clarity on how many of them were from Hubei or how recently they had been there, partly because of American privacy rules.

“We’ve been trying our best to find out this information,” he said. “But it’s not that easy.”

Mr. Huang spoke a day after visiting Boston, where a University of Massachusetts student tested positive for the coronavirus last week after returning from China. School officials said the student was recovering, and remained in isolation.

Asked about instances of anti-Chinese bigotry in the United States that have been tied to the coronavirus outbreak, Mr. Huang said that “I really don’t want to see this,” and that he had expressed his concern to Massachusetts officials that the Boston case not incite such behavior.

“I said, ‘The virus is the enemy, not the Chinese,’” Mr. Huang said.

Looking for the basics? Start here.

Where has the virus spread? You can track its movement with this map.

How is the United States being affected? There were 11 confirmed cases as of Monday. American citizens and permanent residents who fly to the United States from China are now subject to a two-week quarantine.

Xi Jinping signaled a more assertive response.

China’s leader, Xi Jinping, has signaled a more assertive strategy for dealing with the coronavirus epidemic after days of seeming to retreat from center stage.

His convening of a second special Communist Party meeting on Monday was only his second public appearance since the government in Wuhan, which is at the epicenter of the outbreak, took the extraordinary step of locking down the city on Jan. 23. That order was almost certainly approved at the highest levels in Beijing.

Mr. Xi sent Premier Li Keqiang to Wuhan more than a week ago, when the death toll stood at 106. By Tuesday, the toll in China was more than 420 deaths. The Chinese government has reported 20,438 confirmed cases.

A 39-year-old man in Hong Kong died on Tuesday from the coronavirus, the city’s Hospital Authority said.

It was the first death from the outbreak was in Hong Kong, and the second outside mainland China. The other death, of a man from Wuhan, was in the Philippines.

The man who died in Hong Kong traveled by train to Wuhan on Jan. 21 and returned to the Chinese territory two days later, the government said. Health officials said he also had diabetes, which may have impaired his immune system.

Though Hong Kong shares a landmass with mainland China, the territory has not been hit nearly as hard by the outbreak, and has just 17 confirmed cases. A neighboring city just across the border, Shenzhen, has had hundreds of cases.

More than 2,500 medical workers went on strike Monday to demand a fully closed border.

China struggles to keep food available and prices affordable.

Cooped up at home and fearful that the epidemic could last weeks or even months, families across China are hoarding provisions, making it harder for shops and supermarkets to keep fresh food in stock. Many places have closed off roads to passing traffic, slowing truck shipments and raising freight costs.

Chinese officials have vowed to keep food flowing to Wuhan, the inland city of 11 million at the center of the outbreak. Shouguang, one of the country’s biggest hubs for growing, trading and shipping vegetables, has begun donating produce by the truckload to the locked-down city.

Confusion for passengers traveling to, from and in Asia.

The answer to the simplest of questions — do the masks work? — is, unfortunately, not that simple. There isn’t much high-quality scientific evidence on whether masks are an effective safeguard outside health care settings, where experts generally agree that they reduce risks.

It appears that while they can slow the spread of disease when worn by sick people, the masks — of which there is now a global shortage — do little when worn by healthy people.

Still, in some Asian cities like Hong Kong, where long lines form each morning for limited mask supplies, most people on sidewalks and public transportation wear one, and people who don’t are sometimes questioned about it.

Markets are rising as China gives its economy another boost.

The People’s Bank of China said that it pumped a further 500 billion yuan (roughly $71 billion) into the country’s financial system on Tuesday, following an injection of 1.2 trillion yuan (over $170 billion) into its financial markets the day before.

It wasn’t just Wall Street that rallied on the news. In Asia, stocks in Shanghai and Hong Kong were also sharply higher. Major European markets in France, Germany and Italy rose more than 1 percent.

Other recent updates on corporate earnings and the economy have also given investors a lift.

On Monday, a closely watched gauge of manufacturing showed that factory activity expanded in the United States in January, after five straight months of contraction in the industrial sector. The report suggested that the manufacturing turndown — a reflection of a global factory slowdown widely linked to the trade war — that had hampered the American economy might have been easing, at least before the outbreak in China hit.

The recent round of fourth-quarter corporate earning reports have also been better than expected.

Of course, investors can change their minds quickly, and the mood in stock markets may well sour if traders are confronted with evidence of the coronavirus impact that they had not anticipated.

10 passengers on a cruise ship in Japan tested positive for the virus.

The woman, was one of three people recently hospitalized in the city who doctors thought might be infected.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported the negative test results to the city authorities on Tuesday, officials said. Test results for the other two patients are pending, officials said.

“We’re relieved to hear that the person in question does not have the novel coronavirus,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said in a statement. “I can’t say this enough: If you have the symptoms and recent travel history, please see your health provider immediately.”

There has yet to be a confirmed case of the new illness in New York City or anywhere in New York State.

Chinese tourists represent the second-largest group of foreign travelers to New York.

A company that arranges Chinese-language bus tours of the sights in Manhattan is dealing with as many as 300 cancellations from Chinese tourists. And the owner of a Queens travel agency who had booked trips for 200 Chinese tourists in the next two weeks said he might have to lay off two of his five employees.

Restaurant and store owners in New York’s three main Chinatowns say business has been hurt. In restaurants in the Manhattan Chinatown, workers and owners said business had dropped 50 to 70 percent in the last 10 days.

Other victims of the Wuhan lockdown: pets left alone in homes.

With Wuhan in lockdown, volunteers are trying to reach thousands of pets trapped alone in homes and at risk of starvation. Many pet owners who traveled out of the city during the Lunar New Year holiday period left only a few days’ supply of food and water, and they have taken to social media to plead for help in checking on their animals.

One Wuhan resident who asked to be identified as Lao Mao, or Old Cat, told Reuters that his team of volunteers had rescued more than 1,000 pets since Jan. 25, and estimated that as many as 50,000 pets remained unattended in the city.

But gaining entry to locked apartments and buildings, even with owners’ permission, has been a challenge.

In one instance, Lao Mao said, he climbed up rusty pipes to feed two cats in a third-floor apartment that had been left alone for 10 days. He found the cats barely alive under a sofa. When he video-called the owners, who could not return to Wuhan because of roadblocks, they cried.

Macau is closing all casinos for two weeks.

The death toll from the new coronavirus has exceeded that of the severe acute respiratory syndrome outbreak in 2002 and 2003 in mainland China. But the number of people who have recovered nationwide has also risen in recent days, suggesting that the new virus’s fatality rate is relatively low.