An apartment building in Hong Kong, its units linked by pipes. A department store in the eastern Chinese city of Tianjin, where more than 11,000 shoppers and employees mingled. A ski chalet in France, home base for a group of British citizens on vacation.
These sites, scattered around the world, have become linked by a grim commonality: They are places where pockets of new coronavirus cases have emerged in recent days, raising fears about the virus’ ability to spread quickly and far beyond its origins in central China.
Since the dangerous outbreak emerged in late December, the vast majority of cases have been concentrated in Wuhan, the city where the new virus was first reported. Authorities there and in the surrounding province have sealed off tens of millions of people in a desperate attempt at containment.
But as the outbreak’s toll has mushroomed — it has claimed more than 1,100 lives in China and sickened more than 44,000 — it has become clear how easily the virus can be transmitted and how hard it may be to contain, even in communities around the world that are far removed from Wuhan. Many of the people infected had not even been there.
In Tianjin, authorities ordered more than 10,000 people into quarantine, after they traced one-third of cases in the city to a single department store.
In Hong Kong on Tuesday, dozens of residents were evacuated from their apartment building overnight, as two people living 10 floors apart were found to be infected with the coronavirus. Officials said an unsealed pipe might have been to blame.
And in Britain on Tuesday, a businessman who is believed to be the source of 10 other cases in Britain and France said he showed no symptoms before testing positive for the coronavirus. Some of those cases were at a French ski chalet, where the man had stayed after attending a conference in Singapore.
The new coronavirus, though most serious in China, “holds a very grave threat for the rest of the world,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organisation, said at a forum in Geneva on Tuesday.
As the outbreak’s health implications have mounted, so has its political toll. China’s ruling Communist Party dismissed two health officials in Hubei, the province at the centre of the epidemic, and replaced them with a leader sent from Beijing.
