As Dominic Raab told MPs on Tuesday that British nationals should leave China, Britons stuck in the region showed mixed reactions as they grappled with what this means for them in practical terms.
Kieran*, a UK national, who has been working as a teacher in China for the past three years, has spent the last 11 days living in self-imposed quarantine in the city of Nanjing, a few hundred kilometres east of Wuhan, the centre of the Coronavirus outbreak.
What is the virus causing illness in Wuhan?
It is a member of the coronavirus family that has never been encountered before. Like other coronaviruses, it has come from animals. Many of those initially infected either worked or frequently shopped in the Huanan seafood wholesale market in the centre of the Chinese city.
What other coronaviruses have there been?
New and troubling viruses usually originate in animal hosts. Ebola and flu are other examples – severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) and Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome (Mers) are both caused by coronaviruses that came from animals.
What are the symptoms of the Wuhan coronavirus?
The virus causes pneumonia. Those who have fallen ill are reported to suffer coughs, fever and breathing difficulties. In severe cases there can be organ failure. As this is viral pneumonia, antibiotics are of no use. The antiviral drugs we have against flu will not work. If people are admitted to hospital, they may get support for their lungs and other organs as well as fluids. Recovery will depend on the strength of their immune system. Many of those who have died were already in poor health.
Is the virus being transmitted from one person to another?
Human to human transmission has been confirmed by China’s national health commission, and there have been human-to-human transmissions in the US and in Germany. As of 7 February, the death toll stands at 636 inside China, one in Hong Kong and one in the Philippines. Infections inside China stand at 31,161 and global infections have passed 280 in 28 countries. The mortality rate is 2%.
Two members of one family have been confirmed to have the virus in the UK, and a third person was diagnosed with it in Brighton, after more than 400 were tested and found negative. The Foreign Office has urged UK citizens to leave China if they can.
The number of people to have contracted the virus could be far higher, as people with mild symptoms may not have been detected. Modelling by World Health Organization (WHO) experts at Imperial College London suggests there could be as many as 100,000 cases, with uncertainty putting the margins between 30,000 and 200,000.
Why is this worse than normal influenza, and how worried are the experts?
We don’t yet know how dangerous the new coronavirus is, and we won’t know until more data comes in. The mortality rate is around 2%. However, this is likely to be an overestimate since many more people are likely to have been infected by the virus but not suffered severe enough symptoms to attend hospital, and so have not been counted. For comparison, seasonal flu typically has a mortality rate below 1% and is thought to cause about 400,000 deaths each year globally. Sars had a death rate of more than 10%.
Should I go to the doctor if I have a cough?
Unless you have recently travelled to China or been in contact with someone infected with the virus, then you should treat any cough or cold symptoms as normal. The NHS advises that people should call 111 instead of visiting the GP’s surgery as there is a risk they may infect others.
Is this a pandemic and should we panic?
Health experts are starting to say it could become a pandemic, but right now it falls short of what the WHO would consider to be one. A pandemic, in WHO terms, is “the worldwide spread of a disease”. Coronavirus cases have been confirmed in about 25 countries outside China, but by no means in all 195 on the WHO’s list.
There is no need to panic. The spread of the virus outside China is worrying but not an unexpected development. The WHO has declared the outbreak to be a public health emergency of international concern, and says there is a “window of opportunity” to halt the spread of the disease. The key issues are how transmissible this new coronavirus is between people and what proportion become severely ill and end up in hospital. Often viruses that spread easily tend to have a milder impact.
Sarah Boseley Health editor and Hannah Devlin
He was not concerned about the Coronavirus when he first heard of the outbreak but has now decided to leave China.
“I think what Dominic Raab has said is a logical solution to the current issue. It only makes sense to leave. I feel like I am a burden being here now. I have a choice to leave and the longer I stay, the more resources I am using up that the Chinese population may need,” he said.
“A Chinese friend of mine said I was a coward for leaving, but in any situation like this, even in a war, isn’t the best option to get out of the situation? So, after talking to family and friends, I plan to leave as soon as I can,” Kieran added.
Anna*, a British woman living in China, has managed to return to her home in Beijing after she was temporarily stuck in a remote village in northern Sichuan she had travelled to for a holiday at the beginning of the outbreak.
Because all public transport between provinces had been cancelled, she said she paid a small fortune to get a private driver to take herself and her partner back to Chengdu, an 800km journey.
Locals in the village she visited were “absolutely terrified”, she says, with kids reporting the news to their parents since many adults are illiterate. “Since there is no running water or plumbing in that area, they do not wash their hands more than once a day. I am worried that they will get sick and be unable to treat the virus.
“We left at 2am to avoid checks and roadblocks as much as possible. Once we arrived in Chengdu, everything was smooth. All trains were booked up or cancelled but we booked a flight,” she says. “We are in home quarantine for the mandated 14 days now. My office is closed and locked up for the week at least and we are reporting our location and health status every day to the office HR.”
Anna feels relatively unfazed by Raab’s warning. “I took that advice to mean British nationals who don’t live in China but are visiting. For us, Beijing is our home. Going back to the UK would mean travelling, which is expensive and stressful, and possibly a risk of catching or transferring the virus, and having to do another two weeks of home quarantine when I did finally get back to Beijing before going back to the office. So I think the decision to come back to Beijing was the right one and we remain safest in our home.”
Software engineer Julia*, who is a British-Canadian citizen who works in Shenzhen, a tier-one city bordering Hong Kong and home to more than 12 million people, is likely to stay. She said movement in the city had been heavily restricted. As of Sunday, there were 207 confirmed cases of the virus in the city.
“My temperature is checked every time I walk into my apartment lobby,” she said. “When I go outside I have to wear a mask but I’ve not been able to buy one because they’re all sold out. Thankfully I was given one by the concierge but I’ve been using the same one ever since.”
Most of her colleagues are able to work from home but some of them are still in their home provinces on lockdown. “The general feeling is that nobody really knows what is going to happen next. For now, the Foreign Office’s advice doesn’t change my current opinion. I will speak to my employer and take a few days to think about it, but my life is here,” Julia added.
Jack Cochrane, 21, from Middlesbrough, has been working as an English teacher in Shenzhen for the past six months. He just returned from a holiday in Manila six days ago. All but one border to neighbouring Hong Kong have now been shut, and much like other big cities in China, the city is largely deserted.
“My girlfriend is Chinese so we had to come back,” he says. While the streets of Shenzhen are mostly empty, fast-food chains such as McDonald’s, KFC and Pizza Hut are all still open and, in the past 48 hours, Jack has seen a slightly increased flow of cars on the streets of his new home.
“There are reports of people who got infected going into remission on social media and the local news,” he says. “I’ve got another six months on my contract, and I will definitely stay in China until that ends,” he says.
Jack said he was not sure what to make of the Foreign Office’s advice for all UK citizens to leave China. “Flights are very expensive to return, and until I’ve heard from my company there’s not a lot I can do.”
As a huge Middlesbrough FC fan, Jack spent a long time on Saturday wandering the empty streets, trying to find an open bar to watch the Blackburn game, to no avail.
“You hear jiayou, a Cantonese phrase translating into ‘don’t give up’ or ‘hang on in there’ frequently on the streets right now. A lot of people here still remember the devastating Sars outbreak, although they don’t really want to talk about it. People don’t want to admit that this outbreak is potentially worse.”
*Some names have been changed.
