This blog is closed.
We’re going to wrap up this live coverage for now. The most significant updates from the past 12 hours can be found in our latest summary here.
My colleague Lily Kuo in Beijing also just filed this wrap of the day’s events, focusing on the reports of dozens more deaths in Wuhan, where hospitals are said to be increasingly undersupplied and overburdened.
We appreciate you reading along. Keep checking with us for updates as the day goes on.
We’re learning more about this coronavirus each day, but a month since it emerged, there remain some important holes in our understanding — what the former US secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld, might have called known unknowns. I’ve just spoken to Ian Mackay, a virologist at the University of Queensland about what some of those might be.
The disease appears to spreading more efficiently than its cousins Sars or Mers. That’s probably down to the fact that the world is much more dense and interconnected than in 2003, when Sars emerged, and because this coronavirus is more easily transmitted. “It’s more like the flu, which can whip around the world in no time,” says Mackay.
It appears that China will not be able to contain its spread within the country, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the death toll will spike, he says. “One big hole in our understanding is whether the disease is more dangerous than Sars,” he says. “That part is hard to answer because we’re missing a big important number, which is how many people are confirmed cases but haven’t gone to the hospital and are being quarantined at home, and how many have recovered.”
That matters, because it will tell us how many people have gotten only mildly or moderately sick, and therefore how deadly the disease is. If we take the cases that have been reported outside China, the death rate is less than 1%. But understanding the full spectrum of infections inside China will give us a much better idea.
“Usually with respiratory viruses we see the young end of town as the virus spreaders,” says Mackay. Think of the way that kids go to school, spread a cold, then take it home to their parents, who in turn might carry the virus to work.
“So I’m wondering why we’re not seeing kids among the cases,” Mackay says. He speculates it might be because we’re focusing on the most severely infected people, who are presenting to hospital, and missing the fact that many people, including children, might have the coronavirus but are only presenting with relatively minor symptoms and recovering at home.
Viruses are “relentless replicating adaptive machines” that are constantly evolving, and this coronavirus will be no exception, Mackay says. Virologists need to see a larger selection of genome sequences of the virus than are currently available “to see more of what’s happening with the virus as it’s passing through thousands, possibly tens of thousands of hosts”.
Chinese officials have made comments suggesting that the virus is now transmitting more easily. Scientists will want to see evidence of those new cases “just to make sure that there aren’t consistent changes building up in the virus over time that might have an effect” on how it should be fought, he says.
Over the weekend, major international talks on biodiversity loss that were set to take place in China were moved because of the coronavirus outbreak.
The first round of negotiations for a Paris-style agreement on biodiversity, which had been due to take place in Kunming, Yunnan province, between 24 and 29 February, has been moved to Rome.
Biodiversity experts and government policy makers had been set to meet in the city in southern China to discuss plans to protect a third of the world’s oceans and land by 2030.
The UN said the decision to move talks was made in consultation with the Chinese government.
Sixty Italians evacuated from Wuhan arrived at a military base near Rome on Monday.
A passenger who was expected to be onboard the flight remained in Wuhan after contracting a fever, Italian media reported. The group will be quarantined for up to two weeks.
Meanwhile, panic over the virus continues in Italy, with general practitioners and hospital emergency units overwhelmed with people suffering flu symptoms or simply seeking information from professionals. Codacons, the consumers’ group, has called for group tours at popular sites, including the Colosseum in Rome, to be banned. On Friday, Italy announced a state of emergency that will be in place for six months.
As researchers are racing to develop a vaccine for the Wuhan coronavirus, the British drugmaker GSK has teamed up with the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) to aid efforts to produce a vaccine.
GSK, one of the world’s biggest vaccine makers, says it will make its “adjuvant platform technology” available. An adjuvant is added to some vaccines to improve the immune response and means the amount of antigen required per dose can be reduced – allowing more vaccine doses to be produced and made available to more people, which is crucial in a pandemic.
Dr Richard Hatchett, the chief executive of CEPI, says:
Gaining access to GSK’s world-leading adjuvant technology is a huge step forward in developing a vaccine against the novel coronavirus 2019-nCoV. Coupling GSK’s adjuvant systems with the pioneering platform technology we are funding has the potential to make more vaccine available more rapidly – by decreasing the dose of vaccine antigen required to protect each individual.
CEPI, a public-private group based in Norway, is one of several organisations working on a vaccine. It has committed $11m to three programmes led by the companies Inovio Pharmaceuticals and Moderna, and the University of Queensland, with the hope of having a viable vaccine in production within 16 weeks, although testing for safety and efficacy will take much longer.
Meanwhile, a research team at the National Institutes of Health in Maryland has prepared a modified version of a key section of the virus to encourage the body to produce antibodies against the disease. And France’s Pasteur Institute said last Friday that it had set up a taskforce aimed at developing a vaccine against the virus within 20 months.
In Germany, eight people have tested positive for the virus so far. Seven of them, five Germans and two Chinese nationals, are employees of the car parts supplier Webasto, headquartered in Stockdorf, Bavaria. The eighth is the child of one of the employees.
All eight patients were in a “stable clinical condition” and had only shown “flu-like symptoms”, said a spokesperson for the Bavarian health ministry.
Four of the infected Webasto employees had taken part in a training workshop run by a Chinese employee who only started to feel ill on her return flight to China, where she subsequently tested positive for the 2019-nCov virus.
The company’s headquarters in Stockdorf was disinfected by experts over the weekend and was to remain closed until Tuesday. A further 140 employees were tested for the virus, with 80 of them being ordered to stay indoors and avoid human contact even though their test results had returned negative.
If you’re just checking in with us this Monday, here are the major developments in the ongoing coronavirus story:
Stick with us. We’ll be sharing more as it emerges today.
A group of British nationals and some of their foreign relatives currently in quarantine for coronavirus say they are holding up well.
The 94 people are being kept in isolation at Arrowe Park hospital in Wirral after being evacuated from the centre of the outbreak in Wuhan, China, on two repatriation flights. They will be held for two weeks to monitor for any symptoms of the virus.
Kharn Lambert, a PE teacher, has lived in Wuhan for the last five years and was being visited by his 81-year-old grandmother, Veronica Theobald, when the outbreak occurred.
He told Sky News’s Kay Burley on Monday: “It’s quite weird being home but not being home, and also being locked in – almost like being back in Wuhan really – where we can’t get outside certain perimeters and go further, so it’s a bit of a weird feeling, really.”
Lambert said that, out of the first group of 83 arrivals, no one was showing any coronavirus symptoms or complaining about feeling unwell.
“Everybody is in good spirits,” he said. “As you can imagine, it’s not the best of circumstances but we’re all trying to keep our spirits high.
“We’re playing jokes on each other, we’re having a laugh when we have the chance to see each other.”
People in Wirral have donated supplies, including toys and video-game consoles, to keep the quarantined cohort entertained.
The second group of evacuees, made up of seven British nationals and four of their family members, arrived at the Merseyside hospital on Sunday evening.
Lambert said he has not seen the new arrivals and believed they were being housed away from the other people in quarantine.
He praised the staff taking care of the evacuees in the hospital accommodation block. “They’re all being told to wear protection, ie masks and gloves, when they’re in the communal areas.
“They’ve been absolutely fantastic since the moment we arrived and we can’t thank them enough for everything they’re doing for us at the moment.”
Chinese stock markets plunged on Monday morning as investors absorbed the news that coronavirus cases had increased in recent days. Markets had been closed since 23 January for the lunar new year and the falls – including by 7.7% on the Shanghai stock exchange composite index – were not surprising, after share prices elsewhere dropped on the expectation that the virus, which has prompted bans on public gatherings in many Chinese cities and total lockdown of others, would batter economic activity.
We’re tracking the impact of the virus on the markets and all the rest of today’s business news here:
My colleague Kim Willsher has passed along some good news from the Pasteur Institute in Paris, which announced at the weekend that it had managed to isolate and grow a culture of this coronavirus. That means it is available for research, which puts scientists on track to develop a vaccine.
However, that isn’t a quick process. Christophe D’Enfert, a scientific director with the Pasteur Institute, told reporters in Paris the vaccine could be made available in 20 months if “all goes well”.
“At the end of August, we could enter clinical trials and, provided all goes well, obtain a vaccine candidate within 20 months,” he said.
In other positive developments this morning, tests on 20 French passengers on a second plane of 36 people repatriated from Wuhan on Sunday have come back negative. They will still be held in 14-day quarantine, a junior health minister said. A French government spokesperson said all those French citizens who had asked to be brought back to France had now returned.
Hello, this is Michael Safi, I’ll be updating you with the latest developments in this story over the next hours.
We’re getting a little more now from the press conference (given online, not in person) by the Chinese foreign ministry. The government has been at pains to emphasise that it has the tools to control the spread of this coronavirus outbreak, but this morning did concede it needs help – in the form of protective medical equipment.
“What China urgently needs at present are medical masks, protective suits and safety goggles,” the foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said in a press briefing on Monday morning.
China’s factories can produce 20 million masks a day, but panic over the virus has prompted people in the country of 1.4 billion to stock up on them, while frontline medical personnel have reported equipment shortages.
Agence France-Presse provides this context:
At full capacity, China’s factories are only able to produce around 20m masks a day, according to the ministry of industry.
The foreign ministry said countries including South Korea, Japan, Kazakhstan and Hungary had donated medical supplies.
Tian Yulong, of the industry ministry, said earlier on Monday that authorities were taking steps to bring in masks from Europe, Japan and the US, adding that supply and demand in China remained in “tight equilibrium” as factories returned to production after the lunar new year break.
He said they were now operating at between 60% and 70% capacity.
In addition to Hubei, the province of more than 50 million people at the centre of the outbreak, several other provinces and cities across China have made it compulsory to wear masks in public.
These include Guangdong – China’s most populous province – plus Sichuan, Jiangxi, Liaoning and the city of Nanjing, with a combined population of more than 300 million.