SHANGHAI – Tom's Blog

Chinese authorities have extended the country’s internal quarantine to include four additional cities comprising roughly 21 million people in a bid to stop the spread of the novel coronavirus.

Travel restrictions have been placed on residents in Taizhou, Hangzhou, Ningbo and Wenzhou; allowing only one person per household to leave every two days to go and pick up supplies. In addition, residents in Taizhou must present ID every time they leave their homes.

City authorities also have placed rent controls on landlords, expressly forbidding them from renting their properties to people from “severely affected areas such as Hubei,” if they have traveled home in the past few months.

The city of Hangzhou, just 110 miles (177km) from major population center and business hub Shanghai, which boasts over 24 million people, already has 200 confirmed cases of coronavirus. The wearing of face masks in public is mandatory and temperature checks are commonplace for those who venture outside.

Similar measures were announced on Sunday for the city of Wenzhou, which severely restricted movement for its nine million residents in an attempt to curb the spread of the virus.

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In China alone, at least 427 deaths and over 20,000 cases of coronavirus infection have been confirmed. The majority of the deaths have been concentrated in Wuhan in Hubei Province, where the outbreak began in December 2019. The city has been on lockdown for almost two weeks.

China’s leadership acknowledged “shortcomings and difficulties exposed in the response to the epidemic” in a statement on Monday.

“It is necessary to strengthen market supervision, resolutely ban and severely crack down on illegal wildlife markets and trade,” the Politburo Standing Committee said, according to the official Xinhua news agency.

Russia has registered its first patients diagnosed with the new Chinese coronavirus, Deputy Prime Minister Tatiana Golikova has confirmed. The alarming news comes just a day after Moscow closed its Far Eastern border with China.

Golikova told reporters that the two sufferers are Chinese citizens, one in the Far Eastern Zabaikalsky Region, and the other in the Tyumen Region in western Siberia – which are separated by a distance of about 4,000km.

The patients in question have been subjected to “strict monitoring.” They have been put into quarantine and are receiving medical care. The head of Rospotrebnadzor (a state watchdog), Anna Popova, believes there is no immediate risk of the further spread of the coronavirus in Russia.

As a precautionary measure, Moscow will commence the evacuation of around 300 of its citizens from the virus-hit city of Wuhan, and another 341 from the surrounding area. Some 2,600 Russians holidaying on the island of Hainan will also be brought back home, the deputy prime minister announced.

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To prevent the spread of the virus, Moscow is suspending most flights to and from China. The exceptions are Aeroflot routes to Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Hong Kong, as well as Chinese airlines arriving at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport. They will be restricted to Terminal F.

In a further move, Russian citizens will be prohibited from crossing the border with Mongolia.

So far, there have been 213 recorded deaths from the new coronavirus, and more than 9,800 reported infections. The vast majority took place in China but about a hundred cases have been registered in another 20 countries. Now, Russia has become the 21st. On Thursday, the World Health Organization declared the outbreak a global health emergency.