10 Time February 3, 2020
L
unar new Year is a Time for Travel
across China, as people make up to 450 million
trips abroad for vacation or back to their home-
towns for meals with family. But a deadly virus
is also on the move, putting a damper on the celebra-
tions, which fall around Jan. 25 this year.
The outbreak of a viral pneumonia-like illness was
first reported in December in Wuhan, a major city in cen-
tral China. Health officials quickly identified the patho-
gen as a coronavirus related to the virus that caused the
severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak,
which began in southern China in 2002, killing nearly
800 people and turning bustling cities across Asia into
ghost towns.
The new virus sickened more
than 500 people in China and led to
17 deaths as of Jan. 22 and had been
detected in Japan, Thailand, South
Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong. A day
earlier, the first U.S. case was reported
in a Washington State resident who’d
visited China. As the virus spreads,
the world watches warily, nervous
that Beijing will repeat the public
health fiasco of SARS.
In Wuhan, the only faces still seen
on the street were hidden behind
surgical masks, the wearing of which
was made mandatory. At first, harsh
travel restrictions like those imposed
during past outbreaks were avoided,
but planes and trains in and out of
Wuhan were suspended indefinitely on Jan. 23. That’s
no small tweak: Wuhan Tianhe International Airport of-
fers direct flights to at least 15 countries, and to hub cit-
ies such as San Francisco and Sydney. Fifteen million
people were expected to travel through the city by rail,
air and road during the Lunar New Year holiday, accord-
ing to state media.
Meanwhile, officials in the U.S., the U.K. and else-
where stepped up screening for passengers from Wuhan,
and those in China say they’ve installed 35 infrared tem-
perature scanners and more than 300 portable thermom-
eters in the city’s transit hubs—though on a Jan. 22 visit
to Wuhan, TIME saw little evidence of those precautions.
Chinese leaders are eager to show the world that they
are tackling the outbreak head-on. One top political com-
mittee said in a later-deleted Jan. 21 social-media post that
those who interfere with the effort by concealing illness
“will be forever nailed to history’s pillar of shame.”
Still, calls for “transparency” in state media op-eds
went unheeded in Wuhan, where a TIME reporter was
threatened with arrest while observing workers lined up
for inspection by health personnel outside the seafood
market where the outbreak originated. “The government
hasn’t done anything really,” one Wuhan resident grum-
bled. “They closed down places where there are sick peo-
ple but haven’t done anything toward prevention.”
Skepticism about Beijing’s response is compounded
by the fact that China was caught trying to hide infor-
mation on SARS in 2003. “In the SARS era, the Chinese
government delay in handling the outbreak resulted in
uncontrolled spread of the virus,” says Michael Lai, a
corona virus researcher at Taiwan’s Academia Sinica. Lai
says Beijing’s approach has changed. “We have to give
credit. This time the authorities released the viral se-
quences right away so that the worldwide scientific com-
munity and public-health agencies can act rapidly.”
Their next steps inspired less confidence. As the of-
ficial number of cases in China remained unchanged and
authorities insisted for days that there was no evidence of
human-to-human transmission, aca-
demics in the U.K. produced research
on Jan. 17 suggesting the outbreak had
likely infected more than 40 times
as many people as Beijing had con-
firmed. And many in China noted that
cases were confirmed in Thailand and
Japan before Chinese officials admit-
ted it had spread to Chinese cities be-
yond Wuhan. After reporting dozens
of suspected corona virus cases in re-
cent weeks, officials in affluent Hong
Kong only reported the city’s first
likely cases on Jan 22.
That the Chinese government
was—at least initially—censor-
ing some social-media posts about
the outbreak doesn’t help. Locals in
Wuhan resorted to asking foreign friends for updates
from the international media. “Why is the government
scared of public discussion?” wrote one user on the Twit-
ter-like platform Weibo. “They are slow to handle the cri-
sis but fast to shut people up.”
However, once the illness moved beyond China’s bor-
ders, it “caught the imagination of the international
media,” says Steve Tsang, director of the SOAS China In-
stitute at the University of London. That spotlight on the
corona virus may have nudged officials into action, with
President Xi Jinping issuing a Jan. 20 directive to “put
people’s safety and health as the top priority and take ef-
fective measures to curb the spread of the virus.” Tsang
says that Xi realized the need for a robust response and
that Chinese officials have since “scrambled to do some-
thing to show they are acting in concert with the great
leader.” That spotlight is likely to stay strong—giving Bei-
jing nowhere to hide. •TheBrief Opener
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A medical staffer moves biowaste containers past
the entrance of a hospital in Wuhan, the Chinese
city at the center of the coronavirus outbreakWORLD
A deadly new
virus goes global
By Charlie Campbell/Wuhan
and Amy Gunia/Hong Kong