The coronavirus outbreak has sickened more than 28,200 people in Asia, according to statements from health officials. Many other cases are suspected but not confirmed. As of Thursday morning, at least 565 people have died, all but two in mainland China.
Confirmed cases
Sources: The Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University; National Health Commission of the People's Republic of China; local governments. Note: Data as of 9:30 p.m. E.T., Feb. 5
As these maps show, the disease has been detected in at least 24 other countries, most involving people who traveled from China.
Twelve cases have been confirmed in the United States, including a 35-year-old man in Washington state, a couple in their 60s in Chicago and six people in California.
Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
The outbreak is believed to have began in a seafood and poultry market in Wuhan, a city of 11 million people in central China. The virus is readily transmitted from person to person, scientists believe. But how lethal the virus is and and whether it can be contained is unclear.
Follow the latest updates on the coronavirus outbreak.
What’s being done to contain the outbreak?
The Chinese authorities took the extraordinary step of closing off Wuhan, canceling planes and trains leaving the city and suspending buses, subways and ferries within it. By Jan. 24, at least 12 other cities in Hubei Province had issued travel restrictions, including Huanggang, home to seven million people, and Ezhou, a city of about one million.
Railway
networks
About 20 million people live
in these three cities.
XIAOGAN
HUANGGANG
WUHAN
EZHOU
CHINA
Wuhan
Source: OpenStreetMap
A number of countries, including the United States and Australia, are limiting travel to some people who recently traveled to China, and several major airlines said they expect to halt direct service to mainland China for months.
Closing borders to highly infectious pathogens never succeeds completely, experts said, because all frontiers are somewhat porous. Nonetheless, closings and rigorous screening may slow the spread, which will buy time for the development of drug treatments and vaccines.
How big could the outbreak be?
The true number of cases is almost certainly far larger than the number that have been officially confirmed by lab tests.
Thousands of people in Hubei province, where the outbreak began, are suspected of having been infected but have not been officially diagnosed. Doctors there say there is a shortage of testing kits and other medical supplies, and residents say it is nearly impossible to get the health care they need to treat — or even diagnose — the coronavirus.
Various epidemiological models estimate that the real number of cases is 100,000 or even more. Experts urged caution in interpreting those estimates.
“These are very early models that make several assumptions based on what evidence is available,” said David Heymann, an epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. “They aren’t truth — they’re just one step in trying to better understand this outbreak.”https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/world/asia/china-wuhan-coronavirus-maps.html
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