WHAT kind of Chinese New Year celebrations are taking place in Wuhan this weekend? How festive can communities be in the face of a growing public health threat?
Less than a month since a new virus was first detected in Hubei Province’s capital city, a lockdown is in effect. In 18 Chinese cities where some 56 million people live, some travel restrictions are now in place. Persons with flu symptoms are to be kept from boarding boats, buses, planes or trains and are supposed to be escorted to the nearest medical center instead.
Many public celebrations to ring in the Lunar New Year were cancelled in Beijing and several other cities. It is temporarily forbidden to enter the Forbidden City. Or, for that matter, Disneyland in Shanghai.
In Haikou City, nearly 1,500 kilometers south of Wuhan, tourists from Hubei Province were told not to leave their hotel for at least 14 days, while they are under observation, Aljazeera’s correspondent in Beijing reported.
It’s an inconvenient but necessary precaution. It can take 10 to 14 days for symptoms of this new coronavirus to appear. Still, one can’t help but feel sorry for the tourists, who probably saved up for months for a holiday and spent weeks anticipating it, only to get cooped up for two weeks. No hotel is that interesting.
The lockdown is unprecedented. Health authorities don’t really know if keeping people from leaving or entering cities will help contain the spread of this new infection. One gets the sense that they’d rather err on the side of caution.
In roughly 25 days, 2019-nCoV has infected 1,287 people and killed 41 persons in China alone. Most of those who died were elderly individuals with health conditions such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes or hypertension, yet this weekend, a 36-year-old man in Hubei was confirmed among the fatalities. Also this weekend, confirmed cases were reported in Kuala Lumpur and Melbourne. Neither youth nor distance makes you invincible.
It is possible, though, to find a balance between taking precautions and getting on with life. Before daybreak on Saturday, as I stood outside Cebu City’s largest seaport terminal to wait for a cousin and a niece, a group of masked Asian tourists walked by. I’m ashamed to admit that my first thought was: I hope these kids aren’t from Wuhan. They were most likely just taking precautions yet the fact that they wore masks could so easily cause anxiety in some, even as it reassured others.
The World Health Organization, by the way, isn’t recommending wearing masks as a precaution just yet. It only asks that you keep your hands clean, cover your nose and mouth when coughing or sneezing, avoid contact with live animals in markets, and stay away from individuals who have flu symptoms. News organizations are reporting that Wuhan’s hospitals have been “overwhelmed” by the large numbers of citizens who have shown up to be tested. There’s a real risk that persons who may have had the flu—but not the new coronavirus—may end up getting it after spending hours in tightly packed hospital hallways.
If you’ve been around since 2003, you’ve already survived two previous epidemics caused by a coronavirus. It took health authorities about 15 months to contain the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (Sars) outbreak, which began in China in February 2003, but the point they want to emphasize is that it can be contained. A second coronavirus epidemic, the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (Mers-CoV), began in September 2012 and has ended 858 lives since then, according to the World Health Organization.
Whenever these crises occur, the toll gets counted not only in terms of the lives lost but also the cancelled trips, the drops in consumer spending, and the cost that public and private health care systems must bear.
Harder to compute are the unease we feel in large crowds, the disappointment that comes with putting off travel plans, and the temporary spike in the suspicion with which we regard some strangers. I had never thought about Wuhan before. Now that it has gone viral, in more ways than one, I fear it more than I know it.