BEIJING (Reuters) - Chinese health authorities began on Wednesday reporting on asymptomatic cases of the coronavirus as part of an effort to allay public fears that people could be spreading the virus without knowing they are infected with it.
FILE PHOTO: A worker in a protective suit sprays disinfectant at a middle school where classes for students in the final year of senior and junior high school have resumed amid the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak, in Hohhot, Inner Mongolia, China March 30, 2020. Picture taken March 30, 2020. cnsphoto via REUTERS
China, where the coronavirus emerged late last year, has managed to bring its outbreak under control and is easing travel restrictions in virus hot spots.
But there are concerns that the end of lockdowns will see thousands of infectious people move back into daily life without knowing they carry the virus, because they have no symptoms and so have not been tested.
Up to now, the number of known asymptomatic cases has been classified, and it is not included in the official data, though the South China Morning Post newspaper, citing unpublished official documents, recently said it was more than 40,000.
In an effort to dispel public fears about hidden cases of the virus, the government has this week ordered health authorities to turn their attention to finding asymptomatic cases and releasing their data on them.
Health authorities in Liaoning province were the fist to do so on Wednesday, saying the province had 52 cases of people with the coronavirus who showed no symptoms as of March 31, they said in a statement on a provincial government website.
Hunan province said it had four such cases, all of them imported from abroad, it said in a statement on its website.
The National Health Commission is due to start reporting aggregate, national data on asymptomatic cases later on Wednesday.
There is debate among experts about how infectious asymptomatic cases are but the commission has said all cases would be centrally quarantined for 14 days.It said 1,541 people with asymptomatic coronavirus infections were under observation as of the end of Monday.
China has had more than 81,000 cases of the coronavirus and 3,305 deaths.
Reporting by Gabriel Crossley; Editing by Robert Birsel
WASHINGTON — The captain of a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier that has more than 100 cases of coronavirus wrote a stunning plea for help to senior military officials.
In a four-page letter, first reported by the San Francisco Chronicle, Capt. Brett Crozier of the USS Theodore Roosevelt described a disastrous situation unfolding aboard the warship, a temporary home to more than 4,000 crew members.
"We are not at war. Sailors do not need to die. If we do not act now, we are failing to properly take care of our most trusted asset — our Sailors," Crozier wrote. "The spread of the disease is ongoing and accelerating."
He proposed offloading the majority of the crew, quarantining those infected, testing others for the virus and professionally cleaning the ship. He explained in his letter that by keeping the crew on the vessel the Pentagon was taking "an unnecessary risk" that "breaks faith with those Sailors entrusted to our care."
The Pentagon did not immediately respond to CNBC's request for comment.
The USS Theodore Roosevelt is seen while entering into the port in Da Nang, Vietnam, March 5, 2020.
Kham | Reuters
The latest revelation of the coronavirus exposure aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt, which is currently docked in Guam, follows a recently completed port call to Da Nang, Vietnam.
Fifteen days after leaving Vietnam, three sailors from the USS Roosevelt tested positive for the virus. The infections were the first reports of coronavirus on a vessel at sea.
Last week, Thomas Modly, the acting Navy secretary, told reporters at the Pentagon that the trio of sailors and those who had been in contact with the individuals were identified and quarantined.
And while port calls for U.S. Navy ships have since been canceled, Modly defended the decision to complete the port call by saying that at the time, the coronavirus cases in Vietnam were less than 100.
ROME—Italian authorities believe the country’s coronavirus epidemic, the world’s deadliest, is slowing down appreciably after three weeks of national lockdown, a hopeful sign for other Western countries that are following approaches similar to Italy’s with a time lag.
But Italian officials and health experts said it will take until after Easter to cut new infections enough to begin loosening the lockdown and reopen parts of Italy’s economy.
“We seem to be arriving at a sort of plateau, which shows that the measures are working,” said Silvio Brusaferro, president of the National Health Institute, Italy’s main disease-control center.
Italy was the first Western country to suffer a major coronavirus emergency. Many countries around the world have emulated its response, telling people to stay home and businesses to close unless essential. Italy, where a national lockdown began on March 10, has become a test case of whether Western nations can suppress the pandemic fast enough to avoid a deep economic crisis while using strategies less draconian than China’s.
The government in Rome said 105,792 people had tested positive for the coronavirus by Tuesday evening, an increase of 4,053—or around 4%—from the previous day. New daily infections have fallen from a peak of over 6,500 on March 21.
Turning a Corner?
The rate of new coronavirus infections is slowing in Italy
True number of virus carriers is believed to be much higher, since many people with no or few symptoms haven’t been tested. But other indicators are also breeding confidence that Italy’s lockdown is bringing results. The number of hospital admissions across Italy is slowing, and in Lombardy, the worst-hit region, the number of people in intensive care declined by six to 1,324.
However, Italy recorded another 837 deaths on Tuesday from Covid-19, the respiratory disease caused by the coronavirus, bringing the nation’s death toll to 12,428, about 58% of which have been in Lombardy. Health experts say deaths are likely to decline well after infections, because many people dying got infected up to several weeks ago. The tricolor national flag hung at half-mast all over Italy on Tuesday to commemorate the dead.
Members of Italy’s military and civil protection agency move a coffin containing a victim of Covid-19 onto a truck in Bergamo on March 31.
Photo:
Francesca Volpi/Bloomberg News
“Before results became evident, too much time passed, too many died,” said Cristina Capellini, a physician from near Bergamo, where deaths and overwhelmed hospitals have made the Lombard city a symbol of Italy’s pain. Dr. Capellini lost her husband to the coronavirus in early March.
“Don’t make the same mistakes we Italians made. Learn from our experience: Be aggressive in containing the spread of the infection at the very beginning,” she said. “We should make sense of this tragedy by changing the approach toward public health care. It should be given the importance it deserves.”
In Bergamo, pressure is finally starting to ease at intensive-care units that have been forced to ration treatment for weeks. The situation is starting to improve slightly at the city’s Papa Giovanni XXIII Hospital, said Mirco Nacuti, an intensive-care doctor there. But some old people are still dying without making it to the hospital, he said: “The tragedy is continuing in private homes, and the official numbers don’t show it because tests aren’t being done.”
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China is sending doctors and medical supplies to Italy and other countries that have been hit hard by the coronavirus. WSJ’s Eric Sylvers in Milan explains how China is using soft power to change perceptions about its handling of the pandemic. Photo: Moura Balti Touati/Shutterstock
“We’re starting to see a glimmer at the end of the tunnel,” said Frank Rasulo, a senior anesthesiologist and intensive-care doctor at the Spedali Civili hospital system in Brescia, another hard-hit city in Lombardy. Fewer patients are coming into the intensive care unit compared with last week, he said.
“However, they are younger and many are in worse condition due to the fact that they resist longer until calling the ambulance,” said Dr. Rasulo. “Having said that, this characteristic represents the stage where things will soon be slowing down.”
Chiara Appendino, left, Turin’s mayor, stands at attention during a moment of silence to commemorate Italy’s victims on March 31.
Photo:
marco bertorello/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Other countries in Europe are not yet approaching peaks or plateaus in the spread of the virus, because their outbreaks began later than Italy’s. Data suggest many countries are two to three weeks behind Italy. Some other governments in Europe hope that they will avoid Italy’s high death toll because they imposed social-distancing measures at an earlier stage of contagion. But the death toll in Spain, in particular, is rising dramatically.
The Italian government’s scientific advisers began studying on Monday when and how to relax the lockdowns that have frozen much of the national economy. Officials say full lockdown will have to continue until at least Easter. After that, the plan is to reopen some parts of Italian industry—but under stringent safety rules so that infections don’t accelerate again. Service sectors, including restaurants and bars, aren’t expected to reopen until well into May at the earliest.
The strain on Italy’s economy and public finances has prompted negotiations in Europe about how to support the country financially if its borrowing needs spook bond markets, reawakening memories of the eurozone debt crisis of 2010-12. So far, the intervention of the European Central Bank has keep Italy’s borrowing costs stable.
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Denmark, which also imposed social-distancing measures relatively early in March, is also hoping that it can begin to unwind them slowly after Easter. “The corona outbreak has not peaked yet,” said Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, calling on Danes to follow the guidelines and keep their distance. “If we each do what we need to, we will gradually and gently reopen society.”
French authorities hope that daily admissions to intensive care units will start to slow down at the end of this week, thanks to France’s national lockdown. France said 418 patients with Covid-19 died in hospitals in the past day, the worst daily death toll since its epidemic started.
The U.K. has also reported a slower rise in infections in recent days, but “it’s really important not to read too much into this,” said Stephen Powis, medical director for England. “It’s early days; we are not out of the woods.”
Germany’s health minister Jens Spahn said it’s too early to say whether social-distancing measures, including a ban on more than two people gathering, are working yet. New infections in Germany aren’t expected to plateau until mid-April. “We will see how the trend develops by Easter,” said Lothar Wieler, head of the Robert Koch Institute, Germany’s disease control agency.
Epidemiologists most closely watch the number R0, or the average number of people that virus carriers infect. “We estimate that R0 is now around one, maybe a little below,” compared with between two and three before Italy’s national lockdown, said Giovanni Rezza, head of infectious diseases at the National Health Institute in Rome. Italian authorities hope to push the number to well below one, so that the epidemic starts to fizzle out.
“However, I don’t think Italy or other European countries will be able to reach zero new infections soon,” Dr. Rezza said. Rather, he said, Italy will need to continue fighting the virus with testing and containment measures across the country even after its lockdown ends.
“Maybe we are going to win the first battle, but the war will be long,” he said. “And we lost many people in the field.”
—Margherita Stancati and Bojan Pancevski contributed to this article.
It comes just days after British Prime Minister Boris Johnson introduced tighter restrictions around social movement last week in a bid to limit the spread of coronavirus.
Residents spotted herds of goats strolling around Llandudno on Friday and over the weekend, after more than a dozen of the animals ventured down from the Great Orme headland and roamed the streets of the coastal town.
Videos and pictures shared online show the goats grazing on grass from church grounds, flower beds, and residential properties.
They are referred to as Great Orme Kashmiri goats, whose ancestors originated from northern India, according to the town's official website.
Town resident, Carl Triggs, was returning home after delivering personal protective equipment masks when he saw the goats.
"The goats live on the hill overlooking the town. They stay up there, very rarely venturing into the street," he told CNN.
Resident Joanna Stallard spotted the goats in her garden and said they were a regular occurrence.
Mark Richards, from hotel Lansdowne House, told CNN: "They sometimes come to the foot of the Great Orme in March but this year they are all wandering the streets in town as there are no cars or people."
"They are becoming more and more confident with no people," he said, adding that it saves him cutting the hedge.
But local councilor Penny Andow told CNN she has lived in the area for 33 years and has never seen the goats venture from the Great Orme down into the town.
North Wales Police confirmed that they received a call on Saturday about the wild goats.
However, the force said it was "not that unusual in Llandudno."
"We are not aware of officers attending to them as they usually make their own way back," the police said in a statement sent to CNN.
Italy has hit a “plateau” in the coronavirus pandemic — just three weeks after going into lockdown, one of the country’s top health officials said Tuesday.
Dr. Silvio Brusaferro, chief of Italy’s national institutes of health, said the hardest-hit country in Europe has started to see the rate of new infections slowing down.
But despite the downward trend, Brusaferro stressed that it would be premature to lift any lockdown restrictions.
“The curve suggests we are at the plateau,” Brusaferro said. “We have to confirm it, because arriving at the plateau doesn’t mean we have conquered the peak and we’re done. It means now we should start to see the decline if we continue to place maximum attention on what we do every day.”
There were 4,053 new COVID-19 cases announced on Tuesday compared with 4,050 the previous day, officials said.
Italy has reported more than 101,000 infections, causing at least 12,000 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University.
But Brusaferro acknowledged Tuesday that the death toll is likely higher than the official figures, which don’t include people who died at home, in nursing homes and those who were infected by the virus but not tested.
“It is plausible that deaths are underestimated,” he said.
“We report deaths that are signaled with a positive swab. Many other deaths are not tested with a swab.”
It comes just days after British Prime Minister Boris Johnson introduced tighter restrictions around social movement last week in a bid to limit the spread of coronavirus.
Residents spotted herds of goats strolling around Llandudno on Friday and over the weekend, after more than a dozen of the animals ventured down from the Great Orme headland and roamed the streets of the coastal town.
Videos and pictures shared online show the goats grazing on grass from church grounds, flower beds, and residential properties.
They are referred to as Great Orme Kashmiri goats, whose ancestors originated from northern India, according to the town's official website.
Town resident, Carl Triggs, was returning home after delivering personal protective equipment masks when he saw the goats.
"The goats live on the hill overlooking the town. They stay up there, very rarely venturing into the street," he told CNN.
Resident Joanna Stallard spotted the goats in her garden and said they were a regular occurrence.
Mark Richards, from hotel Lansdowne House, told CNN: "They sometimes come to the foot of the Great Orme in March but this year they are all wandering the streets in town as there are no cars or people."
"They are becoming more and more confident with no people," he said, adding that it saves him cutting the hedge.
But local councilor Penny Andow told CNN she has lived in the area for 33 years and has never seen the goats venture from the Great Orme down into the town.
North Wales Police confirmed that they received a call on Saturday about the wild goats.
However, the force said it was "not that unusual in Llandudno."
"We are not aware of officers attending to them as they usually make their own way back," the police said in a statement sent to CNN.
