BEIJING, (Reuters) – The death toll from a new coronavirus in China rose sharply to 132 yesterday with nearly 1,500 new cases, heaping pressure on Beijing to control the disease as U.S. officials said the White House was weighing whether to suspend flights to the country.
The White House is holding daily meetings on the outbreak and monitoring China-U.S. flights as a likely source of infections, sources briefed on the matter told Reuters, though it had decided against suspending air traffic.
A senior Trump administration official said the administration had not asked airlines to suspend flights, after CNBC reported that the White House had told airline executives it was considering such as drastic move.
Fears of the spreading virus have already pushed airlines around the world to reduce flights to China and global companies to restrict employee travel to the country, while sectors from mining to luxury goods have been shaken by concerns for global growth in the event of a worst-case pandemic.
China’s National Health Commission on Wednesday said the total number of deaths from the flu-like virus rose by 26 on Tuesday to 132, almost all in Hubei province which is under virtual lockdown, while the number of confirmed cases rose by 1,459 to a total of 5,974.
Several countries are trying to evacuate their citizens from Wuhan, the city in Hubei at the centre of the epidemic. A U.S. government official who declined to be identified told Reuters a U.S. charter plane had departed from Wuhan earlier on Wednesday, without elaborating on the number of passengers on board.
The U.S. Embassy in Beijing earlier said a chartered plane would pick up its consular staff on Wednesday.
Australia said it would help some citizens leave Hubei and quarantine them on Christmas Island, a remote speck in the Indian Ocean best known for housing asylum seekers.
New cases were reported around the world including Germany, where four people from the same company were infected after one of them contracted it from a colleague while visiting their workplace in China.
The German cases raise concerns about the human-to-human spread of the virus which can be transmitted in droplets from coughs and sneezes and has an incubation period of up to 14 days.
