BEIJING -- China's leader Xi Jinping warned Saturday about the "grave" threat posed by the "accelerating spread" of the coronavirus and urged his government to rally under the Communist Party's central leadership.
The viral outbreak, traced to a wildlife market in Wuhan and coming in the midst of the busy Lunar New Year travel season, has infected more than 1,200 people worldwide and has posed the biggest public health challenge to the Chinese government in more than a decade.
Xi instructed China's highest ruling council, the Politburo Standing Committee, to "comprehensively mobilize" resources and manpower to provide medical aid, guarantee security and order in hospitals, and provide markets with supplies for the strained city of Wuhan, the epidemic's epicenter.
"As long as we are resolute ... we can win the battle of controlling the epidemic," he told top party leaders, according to state broadcaster CCTV.
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Health authorities around the globe are watching as three cases have been confirmed in France, two in the United States and one in Australia, all in patients who had recently traveled to China. There have also been cases in Japan, Nepal, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam.
In the United States, at least 50 people are under observation for the illness in 22 states, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, after two patients, a man in his 30s from Snohomish County, Washington, and a woman who lives in Chicago, were confirmed as infected last week. Authorities are monitoring 50 of the man's contacts for signs of infection.
Although the outbreak is a "very serious public-health threat, the immediate risk to the U.S. public is low at this time," Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC's National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, told reporters Friday.
The U.S. is arranging a charter flight today to fly its citizens and diplomats back from Wuhan, according to The Wall Street Journal. French officials are working on a plan to evacuate nationals out of Wuhan by allowing them to take a bus to Changsha, about 100 miles southwest of Wuhan, according to the South China Morning Post.
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And Russian officials are working with China to organize the departure of Russian citizens from Wuhan and the Hubei province, Georgy Egorov, press officer of the Russian Embassy in China, told Russia's RIA Novosti. As many as 7,000 Russian citizens are on organized tours in China, the executive director of the Association of Tour Operators of Russia, Maya Lomidze, told Russian news agency Interfax.
China's ruling party's central leadership has formed working groups to directly manage the crisis amid reports suggesting that local authorities in Wuhan and Hubei province did not respond as quickly as possible during the early stages of the outbreak last month.
Officials have announced the emergency construction of two brand new hospitals to treat patients in Wuhan, where facilities have been overfilled and medical personnel have collapsed from exhaustion.
More than a dozen cities in Hubei have been effectively locked down, and flights have been restricted at Wuhan, the regional hub.
Across the country, Chinese authorities have canceled the temple fairs and festivals that normally accompany the nation's biggest holiday, while the Forbidden City in Beijing, the most popular sections of the Great Wall and Shanghai Disneyland are all closed to visitors.
The government has also suspended all tour groups from journeys outside the country, state media reported, in another attempt to keep the virus from possibly spreading to new regions and countries. Earlier Saturday, authorities announced plans to temporarily halt inter-province buses to and from Beijing, beginning today.
Information for this article was contributed by Brian Murphy, Yasmeen Abutaleb, Akiko Kashiwagi, Lyric Li and Wang Yuan of The Washington Post.
A Section on 01/26/2020