Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
Hotel bookings plummet by 40,000 in recent weeks as ban on incoming flights from China bites local businesses
The idyllic holiday island of Bali has been hit by the ripple effect of the coronavirus crisis, with tourism plummeting and suggestions it “does not have the capacity” to treat patients if they become sick.
Indonesia, the largest country in south-east Asia, claims to have no cases of coronavirus, but according to the Bali’s tourism board, there have been around 40,000 cancellations of hotel bookings in recent weeks nonetheless. In the first half of February about 740,000 people visited the island – 16.25% fewer than the same period last year – Bali’s airport spokesman told state news agency Antara this week.
British passengers stuck on the cruise ship in Japan where more than 600 people have been infected with the coronavirus have have been told to stay onboard by the Foreign Office, while those who are evacuated face a 14-day quarantine in the UK.
Japanese authorities said those who had tested negative for the virus were allowed to leave on Wednesday, but the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) warned that passengers who disembark may not be allowed to board a British evacuation flight scheduled for later this week.
Hundreds of passengers have begun leaving the stricken Diamond Princess in Japan after testing negative for the coronavirus, ending two weeks of quarantine that experts say failed to prevent the virus spreading onboard.
Japanese TV showed passengers – who spent quarantine largely confined to their cabins – leaving the ship on Wednesday morning to board waiting buses, while others left the pier in Yokohama, near Tokyo, by taxi.
Analysts say epidemic poses gravest threat to authorities since Tiananmen Square – and Beijing’s tight control could backfire
The coronavirus crisis in China has posed unprecedented political challenges to the authorities and prompted them to further crack down on speech freedom and tighten control over people in a desperate move to bolster the regime, say analysts and activists.
After President Xi Jinping ordered “resolute efforts” to curb the spread of coronavirus in his first public remarks on the disease on 20 January, Wuhan was swiftly placed under lockdown. Millions of communities across China also began to implement draconian epidemic control measures.
Beijing’s draconian measures to contain outbreak have delayed global transmission
The World Health Organization is having to perform a diplomatic balancing act over the new coronavirus outbreak, caught between China – whose draconian measures to contain the disease have delayed transmission to the rest of the world –and China’s critics, who say its behaviour is typical of its disregard for human rights.
At every press briefing, WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has defended China’s handling of the epidemic in the face of critical questions, very often from US journalists. At the end of January, when Tedros declared a public health emergency of international concern – having put it off a week earlier under what was assumed to be pressure from Beijing – he praised China for protecting the rest of the world.
The Italian luxury fashion house Prada has postponed a fashion show due to take place in Japan in May.
In a statement, the company said:
Due to the current uncertainty related to the spread of the novel coronavirus, the Prada Resort fashion show originally scheduled for May 21 in Japan will be postponed.
Repatriating passengers from the coronavirus-stricken cruise ship in Japan is not without risks, a medical expert has said.
Paul Hunter, professor in Medicine at the University of East Anglia, said:
Considerable care needs to be made to ensure that the passengers do not transmit infection between themselves or to cabin crew during the flight home and once back on home soil they do not act as a focus for the spread of the disease into their home countries – any returning passengers may be put in quarantine on their return.
It is well known that certain infections such as influenza and norovirus can spread rapidly on board cruise ships. Cruise ships take passengers and crew from all over the world, often passengers are relatively elderly, they spend most of their time on board indoors mixing with others.
The most likely [infection] route is direct person-to-person transmission when people are close to an infected person, but with currently publicly available information it is not possible to rule out other issues at this stage.
Keeping passengers on ship may have helped spread of coronavirus, says one lawyer
Quarantine conditions imposed on a stricken ship in Japan are both morally dubious and appear counterproductive, according to health experts who fear the vessel has become an incubator for the coronavirus Covid-19.
Thousands of people have spent the past two weeks stuck onboard the Diamond Princess cruise ship, which now accounts for the biggest cluster of cases outside mainland China. More than 540 passengers in the Japanese port Yokohama are confirmed to have the virus, after 88 additional cases were confirmed on Tuesday.
Company hit by shutdown in China and says it will fail to meet quarterly revenue target
Apple has warned of global “iPhone supply shortages” resulting from its Chinese factories being shut because of the coronavirus outbreak.
The Californian company told investors on Monday night it would fail to meet its quarterly revenue target of $63-67bn (£48-52bn) because of the “temporarily constrained” supply of iPhones and a dramatic drop in Chinese shoppers during the virus crisis. Apple did not provide a new forecast for its second-quarter revenue.
People who flout new order in Xiaogan city in central Hubei face detention for 10 days as global death toll reaches 1,775. Follow live news and latest updates
Shares in China have posted strong gains after the country’s central bank cut the interest rate on its medium-term lending to try to cushion businesses from the impact of the Covid-19 outbreak. The bank also injected another 200bn yuan of liquidity into the system.
The move is expected to pave the way for a reduction in the country’s benchmark loan prime rate on Thursday, Reuters reports, to lower borrowing costs and ease financial strains on companies hit by the epidemic.
China CSI 300 erases Covid-19 slump.
Why? * Short selling ban (in China this means the Gulag!) * Funds need gov't approval to sell (prove an outflow) * Record repo injections by the PBoC, rate cuts * Xi - will cut taxes and record fiscal stimulus
PBOC cut the rate on MLF to 3.15%, from 3.25% in the previous operation. https://t.co/EXAEiLHayq
A reporter is asking about Australians onboard the MS Westerdam cruise ship that docked in Cambodia last Thursday. An American passenger on that ship was subsequently diagnosed with Covid-19, after testing in Malaysia. The foreign affairs minister, Marise Payne answers:
There were some Australians on the vessel Westerdam. 39 of those have remained in Phnom Penh after the ship finally docked. They have been provided with hotel accommodation in the capital.
US, Canada and Hong Kong offer citizens on Diamond Princess flights home as death toll inside China reaches 1,665
A further 70 people on the Diamond Princess cruise ship quarantined in Japan have tested positive for Covid-19, bringing the total to 355, as three countries say they will fly their citizens on the ship home. It comes as China’s National Health Commission announced the death toll inside the country had risen to 1,665, with 68,500 infections.
The US embassy in Japan announced on Saturday that more than 400 US nationals would be flown home from the quarantined Diamond Princess, currently docked in the port of Yokohama, south of Tokyo.
Pressure is growing on the British government to airlift citizens stranded on a cruise ship stricken by coronavirus, after a Chinese tourist in France became the first person to die from the disease in Europe.
The US announced late on Friday that it would be evacuating more than 400 nationals from the quarantined ship, which has had nearly 300 confirmed coronavirus cases, and British travellers called on their government to do the same.
Europe has recorded its first coronavirus fatality, a Chinese tourist in France, it has been confirmed.
The death of the 80-year-old man, who was visiting Paris with his daughter when he was taken to hospital three weeks ago after falling ill, also marks the first coronavirus mortality outside Asia since the start of the outbreak.
Covid-19 cases pass 66,000 in China as residents in capital who flout new restrictions told they will be ‘held accountable under the law’
Beijing has ordered people returning to the city from holidays to quarantine themselves for 14 days to try to contain the coronavirus spread, as the death toll in China from the outbreak passed 1,500.
On Saturday, the country’s National Health Commission said 2,641 new cases were confirmed in the previous 24 hours, taking the total number of confirmed infections across mainland China to 66,492. There were also 143 deaths in the 24 hours to midnight on Friday, taking total fatalities from the virus to 1,523.
A senior White House official has called on Beijing to be more transparent over its handling of the coronavirus outbreak as Chinese authorities expanded “wartime” measures to limit its spread.
“We are a little disappointed that we haven’t been invited in and we’re a little disappointed in the lack of transparency coming from the Chinese,” said Larry Kudlow, the director of the US National Economic Council.
The true scale of the epidemic caused by the new coronavirus in Hubei province has been thrown into doubt after the Chinese authorities reported more than 13,300 extra cases going back over an unknown number of days or weeks.
The World Health Organization (WHO) said the huge jump in cases in Hubei, bringing the total to more than 60,000 worldwide, was due to a change in the way Chinese authorities was counting them.
As our story makes clear, the World Health Organization (WHO) said the huge jump in cases in Hubei – bringing the total to more than 60,000 worldwide – was caused by a change in the way Chinese authorities were counting them.
The WHO is now working hard to get further details on when the extra cases of “Covid-19” occurred to paint a true picture of the development of the epidemic in Wuhan and other cities in Hubei.
Reuters reports that Donald Trump has praised China over its handling of the outbreak, adding that the United States was working closely with Beijing.
“I think they’ve handled it professionally, and I think they’re extremely capable,” Trump, who has previously been at loggerheads with the Chinese authorities over trade issues, said in a podcast broadcast on iHeart Radio on Thursday.
Health centres step up preparations as World Health Organization raises fears about ability to cope with major outbreak
African health authorities are stepping up preparedness for coronavirus after the head of the World Health Organzation described the outbreak as a “very grave threat for the rest of the world”.
The number of African countries that can test for the virus tripled to 15 this week, with more expected to have testing labs up and running in the coming days. The head of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) said health centres were on “high alert” for new cases.
A paper in the Lancet medical journal, published online, should dispel some of the worries around reported deaths of some babies born to women who have fallen ill with what is now being called COVID-19 infection.
The authors say preliminary evidence suggests the new coronavirus cannot be passed to the baby in the womb.
Hi, Amy Walker here taking over the blog from my colleague Simon Murphy.
Patients who were treated by the two Brighton GPs who have been diagnosed with coronavirus are being traced by health officials, the BBC has reported.
Chinese state media is reporting that party secretary of Health Commission of Hubei Province, Zhang Jin, and the director of the Hubei Provincial Health Commission, Liu Yingzi, have been fired.
Party Secretary of Health Commission of Hubei Province Zhang Jin and director of the Hubei Provincial Health Commission Liu Yingzi were removed from their posts. The two posts will be taken over by Wang Hesheng, a Standing Committee member of the CPC Hubei Provincial Committee. pic.twitter.com/AnGOVOvDOw
The BBC’s correspondent in China, Stephen McDonell, has tweeted about the China’s national health commission changing the way it counts confirmed cases of the virus.
I have seen a lot of this on social media today.
There does however seem to be a suggestion that a change in definition from #China’s National Health Commission re “confirmed case” could’ve soaked up some of the reduction. Patients with no #coronavirus symptoms not counted as “confirmed” any more even if they test positive.
China’s president, Xi Jinping, has made his first public appearance in weeks, as some people began to return to work following the lunar new year holiday, which was extended as authorities grappled with the coronavirus outbreak.
Xi, who has been absent from public view as the crisis worsened, visited a neighbourhood in Beijing’s Chaoyang district. The president had his temperature taken and greeted residents and workers, according to a brief video posted by the state broadcaster CCTV.