The growing coronavirus epidemic is isolating China, as other countries, trying to ward off infection or contain their own smaller outbreaks bar, entry to travelers from China, and companies including Apple scale down travel and business there.
The UK announced on Saturday it had withdrawn all but essential staff from embassies and consulates in China, as authorities at home dealt with fallout from the first two cases confirmed in Britain – a student at the University of York and a visiting relative.
On Saturday, Australia followed the US by imposing a ban on entry to most travellers from China. Canberra said citizens, residents or relatives would still be allowed in. Countries including Uzbekistan and Vietnam cancelled flights from China altogether.
In Hong Kong, where there are strong memories of the impact of the 2003 Sars outbreak, thousands of hospital staff went on strike, demanding that authorities close the border.
Cases of human-to-human transmission, which has driven the fast rise in infections inside China, have been detected in Germany, Thailand, Taiwan, France, Japan and the US.
Modelling published in the Lancet suggested more than 75,000 people could have been infected in Wuhan a week ago, about 50 times higher than the official worldwide total of cases at the time.
If the transmissibility of the disease was “similar everywhere”, the paper said, epidemics could already be “growing exponentially in multiple major cities of China with a lag time behind
the Wuhan outbreak of about one to two weeks”.Inside China, quarantine rules that have put around 50 million people on lockdown are being tightened in some places.
Huanggang, the second-worst-affected city, with over 700 infections and 14 deaths, has effectively confined almost everyone to their homes.
One person from each family will be allowed out to get food every two days, although there are exceptions for medical workers, sick people seeking treatment, and those staffing supermarkets and hospitals.
Elsewhere, local governments have pushed back the end of the lunar new year break; schools and universities will not resume classes this week as planned, and in some places factories have been told to delay restarting work.
People have been urged to delay weddings, particularly the large numbers planned for today, 2 February – a popular date because, written as a sequence of numbers, it is a palindrome: “02 02 2020”.
