Chinese don masks as alarm grows over mystery virus

BEIJING • Bundled up in winter clothes as they headed home for the Chinese New Year holiday amid a health scare over a mystery new virus, Chinese travellers on the teeming concourse of Beijing West station were evenly split between the masked and the barefaced.

Covering up was clearly the best decision for many of the passengers waiting to board the packed train carriages for the 51/2-hour journey to Wuhan, the epicentre of an outbreak that has sent shivers through the world's most populous country.

Going back to her home town, 28-year-old Tan Jie had been ribbed at work about the danger of contracting the new coronavirus, but the blue surgical mask on her face showed that she was taking the risk seriously.

"My Beijing colleagues joked and said, 'When you come back to work, we will have to quarantine you for two weeks,' " Ms Tan said, trying to make light of the dampener the scare had put on the most important holiday for Chinese families.

So far, three people have died, and the authorities globally have counted over 200 reported cases.

Ms Liao Guang and her husband were looking forward to being reunited with their two-year-old child in Yichang, a city in the same province as Wuhan, and rushed to buy masks before travelling, as alarm spread on social media after the number of confirmed cases trebled at the weekend.

"All the trending items were about this pneumonia outbreak, so I thought we should buy a mask and take some kind of a preventative measure," said Ms Liao, a 26-year-old who was trailing a wheelie bag.

"I think during this (holiday), we are not going to go out too much, and probably won't go to places with a lot of people, like the movie theatre."

Little remains known about the virus, including its source, how easily it can spread or its severity, though some experts say it is less deadly than the earlier severe acute respiratory syndrome, or Sars, virus, which killed nearly 800 people in 37 countries after an outbreak in southern China in 2002 to 2003.

Symptoms of the new virus include fever and difficulty in breathing, like many other respiratory diseases.

While it is unclear whether masks provide effective protection, for people with no other information, they are the most obvious precaution.

Drugstores in Wuhan reported that mask sales have surged.

"Today, we have sold out of the single-use masks, and I need to prepare for tomorrow's supply," said a worker at a branch of Beike Drug Store. "Demand has surged 10 times compared with before the disease broke out."

Beijing has said that the outbreak is controllable, and vowed to step up efforts to prevent its spread ahead of the holidays which begin late this week, when hundreds of millions of Chinese will travel domestically and abroad.

At the Beijing West railway station, the number of people wearing masks was pretty well matched by those without anything covering their faces, and there were no visible infrared temperature cameras for detecting elevated body temperatures.

The outbreak, as well as disclosures from local governments about patients under quarantine pending a confirmed diagnosis, was among the top trending topics on social media platforms yesterday.

Some users expressed anger at a lack of clear guidance from the authorities on precautions that could be taken.

"I have to search on Weibo by myself for all the new developments - no notice from schools, companies or the compound where I live," one user of Weibo, China's equivalent of Twitter, complained.

Others took aim at people going without masks for not taking the outbreak seriously.

"So ignorant, so fearless, so arrogant," one user said.

REUTERS