[With infections doubling every four days and
more than 600 deaths, China intensified its response in Wuhan, with
house-to-house temperature checks and mass confinements at quarantine centers.]
By Amy Qin, Steven Lee Myers and Elaine Yu
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Jiangtan
park in Wuhan, China, on Wednesday. Credit Getty Images
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WUHAN,
China — The Chinese
authorities resorted to increasingly extreme measures in Wuhan on Thursday to
try to halt the spread of the deadly coronavirus, ordering house-to-house
searches, rounding up the sick and warehousing them in enormous quarantine
centers.
The urgent, seemingly improvised steps come
amid a worsening humanitarian crisis in Wuhan, one exacerbated by tactics that
have left this city of 11 million with a death rate from the coronavirus of 4.1
percent as of Thursday — staggeringly higher than the rest of the country’s rate
of 0.17 percent.
With the sick being herded into makeshift
quarantine camps, with minimal medical care, a growing sense of abandonment and
fear has taken hold in Wuhan, fueling the sense that the city and surrounding
province of Hubei are being sacrificed for the greater good of China.
The harsh new moves in Wuhan, the epicenter
of the outbreak, clearly signaled the ruling Communist Party’s alarm that it
had failed to gain control of the coronavirus epidemic, which has overwhelmed
the country’s health care system and threatened to paralyze China, the world’s
most populous country and second-largest economy.
The steps were announced by the top official
leading the country’s response to the virus, Vice Premier Sun Chunlan, as she
visited Wuhan on Thursday. They evoked images of the emergency measures taken
to combat the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic that killed tens of millions people worldwide.
Despite the severity of the new measures, however, they offered no guarantee of
success.
The city and country face “wartime
conditions,” Ms. Sun said. “There must be no deserters, or they will be nailed
to the pillar of historical shame forever.”
Enforcing the new restrictions took on
aspects of a military campaign as Ms. Sun ordered medical workers to mobilize
into round-the-clock shifts to visit each home in Wuhan, check the temperature
of all residents and interview close contacts of any infected patients.
Word of the new restrictions arrived as the
people of Wuhan received an emotional gut punch from the news that a doctor who
had warned of the outbreak in December — and was silenced by the police for it
— had died from the coronavirus infection. The Wuhan City Central Hospital said
in a posting on its social media account that its efforts to save the doctor,
Li Wenliang, had failed.
“We deeply regret and mourn this,” the
posting said.
Wuhan already had been basically shut down
and isolated because of the contagion that began more than a month ago. The
transportation lockdown has made it difficult to restock dwindling medical
supplies for the province’s more than 50 million people, and has raised the
possibility that food shortages may soon occur.
The new measures were announced two weeks
after China barred people from leaving Wuhan, then expanded the restriction to
cities in the central province of Hubei and now confines more than 50 million
people — a containment of nearly unimaginable scope.
Still, the number of confirmed infections has
doubled roughly every four days, afflicting more Chinese cities and towns, and
experts have questioned whether the government’s actions are imposing undue
hardship on people while doing little to slow the epidemic.
As of Friday, government figures showed the
virus had killed at least 636 people and infected at least 31,161, and many
believe those official statistics are far from complete. The fatality rate for
Hubei province as a whole was 2.8 percent as of Thursday.
The authorities have begun to direct patients
in Wuhan to makeshift hospitals — including a sports stadium, an exhibition
center and a building complex — that are intended to house thousands of people.
Inspecting one of the centers, set up in Hongshan Stadium, Ms. Sun said that
anyone requiring treatment should be rounded up, if necessary, and forced into
quarantine.
“It must be cut off from the source,” she
said of the virus, addressing city officials at the shelter, according to a
Chinese news outlet, Modern Express. “You must keep a close eye. Don’t miss
it.”
It was not clear how the already-strained
facilities could handle an influx on the scale she seemed to suggest, or
whether the new shelters were equipped or staffed to provide even basic care to
patients and protect against spreading the virus.
Photos taken inside the stadium showed narrow
rows of simple beds separated only by desks and chairs typically used in
classrooms. Some comments on Chinese social media compared the scenes with
those from the Spanish flu pandemic, the deadliest in modern history.
China’s leader, Xi Jinping, called the
epidemic “a major test of China’s system and capacity for governance” on
Monday. But appearing with Prime Minister Hun Sen of Cambodia two days later,
Mr. Xi said the Chinese government’s efforts were “achieving positive results.”
Mr. Xi did not make a public appearance on
Thursday, apparently delegating the responsibility for the crisis to deputies,
who all adopted the militaristic tone set by the People’s Daily this week when
it described the campaign to contain the epidemic as a “people’s war.”
Even so, there were increasing signs that the
restrictions on entering and leaving Hubei were slowing the resupply of
medicines, protective masks and other necessities, despite pledges by Beijing
and by private companies and charities that relief was en route.
“This is almost a humanitarian disaster,
because there are not sufficient medical supplies,” said Willy Wo-Lap Lam, an
adjunct professor at the Center for China Studies at the Chinese University of
Hong Kong. “The Wuhan people seem to be left high and dry by themselves.”
Many medical experts believe that the number
of those infected — and those who have died — is higher than the official
count. Many Wuhan residents who are unwell but unsure whether they have the
disease have been forced to go from hospital to hospital on foot, only to be
turned away from even being tested for the virus, let alone treated.
Others wandered around in full protective
clothing or with improvised safety measures, like plastic bags on their heads.
Many have resorted to self-quarantine at home, risking the spread of the virus
within families and neighborhoods.
Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease
specialist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tenn., said
the challenges faced by the Chinese health authorities just managing the crisis
in Wuhan were enormous.
“When both the physical and human resources
for direct medical care are stretched, you’re going to have some unfortunate
events and people will die,” he said. “You can’t manage that great a surge of
patients for an extended period of time.”
But Dr. Schaffner also raised questions about
the new steps, including risks to both coronavirus patients and their
caregivers in makeshift quarantine shelters.
“What happens to the people who are sick?” he
asked. “Do they receive care, and at what level? And can the caregivers, in the
circumstances of a stadium or school auditorium, provide care effectively — and
keep themselves safe?”
Other outside experts said that concentrating
large numbers of sick people together in dormitory-like facilities created
conditions ripe for inadvertently spreading a range of infectious diseases.
“A lot of these people already have
underlying health problems that need to be cared for,” said Thomas M. File Jr.,
president of the Infectious Diseases Society of America. “You put them all in
close proximity, and they could be exposed to other infections that are even
more easily spread than coronavirus, like tuberculosis, which is airborne, and
bacterial infections that can spread among dense populations.”
The epidemic has brought much of China to a
virtual standstill, even far from Wuhan. Each day brings reports of more cities
effectively sealed off, public events and gatherings canceled through February
or beyond, and schools preparing to postpone their post-Lunar New Year
reopenings.
The impact also has spilled across China’s
borders, despite the government’s frenetic efforts to respond to the epidemic
while publicly portraying it as a manageable crisis. Nearly 200 infections with
the virus have been confirmed in about two dozen other countries and
territories, and two of the patients outside China have died.
Other countries have stepped up their own
efforts to quarantine patients, including those on two cruise ships. Global
corporations that depend on China’s huge market and supply chains are
scrambling to deal with disruptions caused by the coronavirus, acknowledging
how much they have come to count on the Chinese economy.
In Wuhan, the first concern is the
humanitarian plight of a city beginning its third week in a state of siege. The
confusion caused by sweeping calls for action at the top and a chaotic
situation on the ground indicated that the Chinese government had not yet
gotten a handle on the crisis.
Wang Chen, a respiratory expert who is
president of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, said the new makeshift
treatment sites had been designed to counter transmissions within households
and neighborhoods.
“If a large number of patients with mild
symptoms live at home or suspected patients roam around in the community, they
will become the main source to spread the virus,” Mr. Wang said, according to
the Xinhua news agency.
A widely shared post on Weibo, a popular
social media site, said on Thursday that “conditions were very poor” at the
Wuhan exhibition center that has been converted into a quarantine facility. The
writer, who said he had relatives in the shelter, cited power failures and
problems with heating, saying people had to “shiver in their sleep.”
The post said there appeared to be shortages
of staff and equipment. “Doctors and nurses were not seen to be taking note of
symptoms and distributing medicine,” it said, and oxygen devices were
“seriously lacking.”
With public anger simmering, the Communist
Party has moved to stifle news organizations and social media platforms where
criticism of the government’s initial response were for a time left uncensored
online.
The China Media Project, a watchdog group in
partnership with the University of Hong Kong, published a directive from the
Cyberspace Administration of China, which oversees the internet, accusing
several social media companies of “illegally engaging in internet news
information services in epidemic-related reports.”
It said some of the country’s giants,
including Sina Weibo, Tencent and ByteDance, would be placed under special
supervision to ensure “a favorable online environment for winning the war for
prevention and control of the coronavirus outbreak.”
Amy Qin reported from Wuhan; Steven Lee Myers
from Beijing; and Elaine Yu from Hong Kong. Reporting was contributed by Chris
Buckley from Wuhan; Sui-Lee Wee from Singapore; Daniel Victor, Raymond Zhong,
Tiffany May, Carlos Tejada and Isabella Kwai from Hong Kong; Michael
Wolgelenter from London; Motoko Rich from Tokyo; and Roni Caryn Rabin from New
York. Elsie Chen and Claire Fu contributed research.
