China’s Crisis Wanes as Epidemic Takes Hold in USChina’s coronavirus caseload continued to wane Tuesday even as the epidemic took a firmer hold beyond Asia, with three countries now exceeding 1,000 cases and the U.S. reporting its sixth death.
The health ministry announced just 125 new cases detected over the past 24 hours, China’s lowest number since Jan. 20. Another 31 deaths were reported, all of them in the hardest-hit province of Hubei. The figures bring China’s total number of cases to 80,151 with 2,943 deaths.
The global shift in the COVID-19 epidemic was apparent with 2,410 recovered patients being released from Hubei’s hospitals and treatment centers, many of them hastily built over recent weeks to cope with the thousands of people sickened by the virus. But new infections outside China were far surpassing its totals.
Clusters of disease grew in South Korea, Italy and Iran, and the virus has turned up for the first time in New York, Moscow and Berlin, as well as Latvia, Indonesia, Morocco, Tunisia, Senegal, Jordan and Portugal. The worldwide death toll topped 3,000, and the number of cases tops 89,000 in about 70 countries.
Global health officials sought to reassure the public that the virus remains a manageable threat.
“Containment is feasible and must remain the top priority for all countries,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said.
Around the world, the crisis reshaped the daily routines of millions of people.
School children in Japan stayed home with schools closed until April. Israelis in quarantine used special booths to vote in national elections. Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel was rebuffed by her interior minister when she extended her hand to greet him. And the United Nations postponed a major conference on women that had been expected to bring up to 12,000 people from its 193 member countries to New York next week.
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development warned that the world economy could contract this quarter for the first time since the international financial crisis more than a decade ago. “Global economic prospects remain subdued and very uncertain,” it said.
Nevertheless, the Dow Jones Industrial Average soared nearly 1,300 points, or 5%, as stocks roared back from a seven-day rout on hopes that central banks will take action to shield the global economy from the effects of the outbreak. Finance ministers and bank leaders from the Group of Seven major industrial countries said they will confer by phone Tuesday to discuss an economic response.
Health officials in Washington state, where a particularly troubling cluster of cases surfaced at a nursing home outside Seattle, said four more people had died from the coronavirus, bringing the number of deaths in the U.S. to six, all in Washington. New cases were also reported in New Hampshire and New York.
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