BEIJING -- The Chinese city of Wuhan shut down outbound flights and trains as the world's most populous country battled the spread of a new virus that has sickened hundreds of people and killed 17, Chinese state media outlets said early today.
The state-owned People's Daily newspaper said no one would be allowed to leave the city of several million people. The official Xinhua News Agency said no one would be permitted to leave without a specific reason. Train stations and the airport were to shut down at 10 a.m. Buses, subways, ferries and long-distance shuttle buses also were to be idled.
Most of the cases are in Wuhan and surrounding Hubei province, but dozens of infections have popped up this week around the country as millions travel for the Lunar New Year holiday, one of the world's largest annual migrations of people. A handful of infected people from Wuhan have been found overseas.
A man who fell ill Monday in Mexico after a December trip to Wuhan is under observation as a potential case. The 57-year-old molecular biology professor works for the Instituto Politecnico Nacional university in the city of Reynosa, which borders with the U.S. The man returned to Mexico on Jan. 10 through a Mexico City airport and then flew to the state of Tamaulipas, Mexican authorities said.
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In Geneva, the World Health Organization put off deciding whether to declare the outbreak a global health emergency and asked its expert committee on the issue to continue meeting for a second day today. The organization defines a global emergency as an "extraordinary event" that constitutes a risk to other countries and requires a coordinated international response.
The number of new cases has risen sharply in China, the center of the outbreak. The 17 deaths announced Wednesday night were all in Hubei province, where the outbreak emerged in the provincial capital of Wuhan late last month. Wuhan authorities said the province has confirmed 444 cases, which would bring the national total to more than 500.
"There has already been human-to-human transmission and infection of medical workers," Li Bin, deputy director of the National Health Commission, said at a news conference Wednesday with health experts. "Evidence has shown that the disease has been transmitted through the respiratory tract and there is the possibility of viral mutation."
The illness comes from a newly identified type of coronavirus, a family of viruses that can cause the common cold as well as more serious illnesses such as the SARS outbreak that spread from China to more than a dozen countries in 2002-2003 and killed about 800 people. Some experts have drawn parallels between the new coronavirus and Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome, another coronavirus that does not spread very easily among humans and is thought to be carried by camels.
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But WHO's Asia office tweeted this week that "there may now be sustained human-to-human transmission," which raises the possibility that the epidemic is spreading more easily and may no longer require an animal source to spark infections, as officials initially reported.
Authorities in Thailand on Wednesday confirmed four cases -- a Thai citizen and three Chinese visitors. Japan, South Korea, the United States and Taiwan have all reported one case each. All of the illnesses were of people from Wuhan or who recently traveled there.
In response to the U.S. case, President Donald Trump said: "We do have a plan, and we think it's going to be handled very well. We've already handled it very well. ... we're in very good shape, and I think China's in very good shape also."
"The situation is under control here," Thai Public Health Minister Anutin Charnvirakul told reporters, saying there are no reports of the infection spreading to others.
Macao, a former Portuguese colony that is a semiautonomous Chinese city, reported one case Wednesday.
North Korea has banned foreign tourists to guard against the spread of a new virus from China, tour operators in China said.
Information for this article was contributed by Dake Kang, Emily Wang, Tassanee Vejpongsa, Hyung-jin Kim, Maria Cheng, Yanan Wang and Alice Fung of The Associated Press; and by Cyntia Barrera Diaz and Lorena Rios of Bloomberg News.
A Section on 01/23/2020