Coronavirus Live Updates: World Reaches ‘Decisive Point’ in Outbreak Fight, W.H.O. Says

Fears that a global pandemic is inevitable take hold.

Financial markets around the world continued their relentless plunge on Friday, with European exchanges all declining more than 3 percent. Wall Street seemed poised to follow.

Investors have been unnerved by the steady march of the new coronavirus around the globe, and the growing threat it poses to economic growth.

Africa has long been a source of concern, and a case in Nigeria raised fears that more infections might lurk undetected. In Europe, Wales and Northern Ireland both reported their first confirmed cases.

In Japan, already in shock over the decision to close schools for a month, officials in Hokkaido, the northernmost of Japan’s main islands, declared a state of emergency because of the pace of new infections there.

Switzerland banned all gatherings of more than 1,000 people.

The drumbeat of reports added to the sense that the outbreak may be becoming a pandemic, with health officials close to admitting it may have passed the point of no return.

More than 83,000 people in at least 53 countries have been infected, and more than 2,800 have died. New infections outside China are now outpacing those within the country, the site of the first and by far the largest outbreak.

“This virus has pandemic potential,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director general of the World Health Organization, warned late Thursday. “We are actually in a very delicate situation in which the outbreak can go in any direction based on how we handle it.”

Even as countries prepared for the likelihood of significant outbreaks, early missteps raised troubling questions about how nations will handle a flood of cases — even those with robust health care systems.

A whistle-blower complaint in the United States outlined how federal health care workers had interacted with quarantined Americans without proper training or safety equipment.

Leaders Italy and South Korea defended their handling outbreaks — the largest outside China — even as the number of cases in those countries continued to grow.

European and Asian markets tumbled again on Friday as investors became even more concerned about the potential harm to worldwide economic growth from the spread of the new coronavirus.

Indexes in Britain, Germany and France slid more than 3 percent in early trading on Friday. The losses followed a 4.4 percent drop in the S&P 500 on Thursday, the worst day for American shares since 2011.

Futures markets indicated that Wall Street would open lower on Friday, too.

Investment bank economists issued increasingly glum predictions of how much the coronavirus outbreak would hurt economies around the world.

“The more countries that are faced with fighting a pandemic, the wider the potential for economic disruption and potential for increased recessionary risks,” Tai Hui, the chief market strategist for Asia at J.P. Morgan Asset Management, said in a research note on Friday.

The declines in Europe followed another grim day of trading in Asia. Shares in Japan fell 3.7 percent, and markets in Australia and South Korea each declined 3.3 percent.

The Shanghai index dropped 3.7 percent, and Hong Kong shares fell 2.5 percent.

Nigeria on Friday confirmed its first case of coronavirus, raising fears of how an outbreak could wreak havoc in Africa’s most populous nation and across the continent.

The case, confirmed by the Nigerian Health Ministry, is the first confirmed infection in sub-Saharan Africa. The ministry said the patient was an Italian citizen who had returned to Lagos, the country’s largest city, from Milan on Feb. 25.

The Nigerian government said in a statement that the patient was stable, did not have “serious symptoms” and was being treated at the Infectious Disease Hospital in Yaba, a suburb of Lagos.

Despite the steady number of flights and the growing relationship between China and African countries, the only previously confirmed infections on the continent had been in Egypt and Algeria.

Dr. Osagie Ehanire, Nigeria’s minister of health, said in a statement that the country had been shoring up its preparedness since the virus started spreading in China and that it would respond with all available resources.

Africa has very few confirmed cases, but experts have already expressed concerns about how the continent would cope with a wide-scale outbreak.

The Africa Centers for Disease Control and the W.H.O. have worked with African nations to improve surveillance and testing.

Currently, 26 laboratories on the continent are able to test for the coronavirus, up from two in early February.

Dr. Ngozi Erondu, an associate fellow in the Global Health Program at Chatham House, an international research group in London, said it would be crucial for all African countries to enhance scrutiny of all travelers, especially those coming from countries with documented outbreaks.

“Staff at points of entry must realize that Covid-19 has no ethnicity or nationality, so personal biases must be checked,” she said, using the name of the disease caused by the coronavirus.

Japanese province declares a state of emergency.

Officials in Hokkaido, the northernmost of Japan’s main islands, declared a state of emergency because of the pace of new infections there, the national broadcaster, NHK, reported on Friday.

The governor of the prefecture, Naomichi Suzuki, called on residents to refrain from going out over the weekend, the broadcaster said. School boards on the island had already moved to cancel classes, even before Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s request on Thursday that all schools nationwide close for about a month.

Japan has more than 200 cases of the new coronavirus and four deaths, in addition to more than 700 cases and an additional four deaths from the Diamond Princess cruise ship, which spent two weeks quarantined while docked in Yokohama.

The latest death, reported on Thursday, was a man in his 80s on Hokkaido who had pre-existing conditions, the governor told reporters. Fifteen new cases were also reported in the prefecture on Thursday, bringing the total number there to 54, the highest in Japan. Two of the new cases were children under 10, officials said.

Japanese officials are facing increasing pressure to take action amid discussion of canceling the Tokyo Olympics, scheduled to begin in July. Major events have been canceled or postponed around the country.

President Battulga Khaltmaa of Mongolia and other government officials have begun a 14-day quarantine after returning home from China, the state news agency Montsame reported on Friday.

Mr. Battulga and the other senior officials including the foreign minister visited Beijing on Thursday and held meetings with the leader of China, Xi Jinping, and Premier Li Keqiang.

The Mongolian president said he would donate 30,000 sheep to China in support of the country’s fight against the epidemic, according to Chinese state media, which hailed Mr. Battulga as the first foreign head of state to visit the country since the outbreak.

The president and his team were immediately taken into quarantine upon arriving in Mongolia as a precautionary measure, Montsame reported.

Mongolia, which shares a border with China, has not reported any confirmed cases. The landlocked country had earlier closed its borders to China and temporarily banned arrivals from Japan and South Korea. All schools and universities have been closed until the end of March, and the country has extended its suspension of coal deliveries to China until mid-March.

A dog that was owned by a Hong Kong resident infected with the coronavirus tested “weak positive” for the pathogen, the city’s government said Friday, but experts cautioned that further tests were needed to confirm if the animal had actually contracted the virus.

The authorities found remnants of the virus in the dog, who was removed from its owner’s apartment on Wednesday, but said dog did not have any “relevant” symptoms.

The Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department said it would conduct additional tests to determine if the initial findings were the result of “environmental contamination” rather than an infection.

Ben Cowling, a professor at the School of Public Health at the University of Hong Kong, said the result could indicate that the dog “licked a contaminated surface and the virus was picked up as contamination, not infection.”

The dog was taken by the authorities and put in quarantine. The government said it would be reunited with its owners if it conclusively tested negative for the virus that causes the respiratory disease Covid-19.

The Health Department on Friday said going forward, pets owned by residents who tested positive for the virus would be placed in quarantine for 14 days.

The new coronavirus is believed to have started in mammals, likely bats, before jumping species to humans. Since the start of the outbreak, some have feared that pet cats and dogs were at risk for infection, but the authorities have not yet determined if those animals can catch or transmit the virus to people.

In Hong Kong and mainland China, where surgical masks are a coveted commodity, protective pet owners have recently been seen putting masks and makeshift facial coverings on their cats and dogs.

South Korea races to test more people.

The number of people infected with the coronavirus in South Korea shot up to 2,337 on Friday, as officials struggled to get a handle on the outbreak, which has also become a political crisis for the country’s leader, Moon Jae-in.

Since Mr. Moon raised the epidemic alert to its highest level on Sunday, the government has sent score of health workers to Daegu, the center of the largest outbreak outside of China. Nearly 85 percent of the cases in South Korea have been found among members of a large, shadowy church in the city.

Although smaller outbreaks have popped up in other cities across South Korea, including Seoul, the capital, health officials said that their war against the virus hinged largely on how quickly they can win the battle in Daegu, South Korea’s fourth-largest city with 2.4 million people.

In Daegu, health officials’ most urgent job has been to test nearly 1,300 members of the Shincheonji Church, who have reported potential symptoms of the virus, as well as those people with whom they have been in contact.

In the past few days, workers have tested up to 1,000 people a day, accounting for the sharp rise in the daily tally of patients.

“We have not finished our testing of Shincheonji worshipers in Daegu yet and as the statistics from there reach us, you will see daily increases in the number of patients,” said Jung Eun-kyeong, head of the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In a sign of the epidemic’s toll on business activity, including the entertainment industry, the K-pop supergroup BTS canceled a series of upcoming concerts on Friday.

The coronavirus “outbreak has made it impossible at this time to predict the scale of the outbreak during the dates of the concert in April,” the boy band said in a statement.

The Lancet withdraws essay purportedly written by front-line nurses in China.

The medical journal The Lancet has retracted an appeal for international help for Chinese medical workers after the article’s two authors said it was not a firsthand account.

The letter published earlier this week on the journal’s website claimed to speak on behalf of a group of professional nurses who traveled to Wuhan to work in hospitals treating patients with the coronavirus.

But The Lancet said in a statement dated Wednesday that it had been contacted by the two authors, Yingchun Zeng and Yan Zhen. The Lancet said it was told that the account they described was not based on their own experience and “they wished to withdraw the piece.”

The Lancet declined to further explain the retraction.

The letter was striking for its direct challenge to the official narrative in state media that the situation in Wuhan was improving. It described the physical and mental toll of the work and detailed a severe shortage of protective equipment.

“We are asking nurses and medical staff from countries around the world to come to China now, to help us in this battle,” the letter read. “In addition to the physical exhaustion, we are also suffering psychologically. While we are professional nurses, we are also human.”

Detailed information about the situation in Wuhan and hospitals across China is hard to come by. China’s censorship machine has tightened its grip on social media accounts of nurses fainting and doctors complaining of limited resources. In Hubei Province, the heart of the epidemic, nurses and doctors have pleaded for more masks. Many have since been directed by local authorities not to speak to the media.

Hundreds of medical workers have been infected, authorities have since said, and several have died.

The New York Times was not able to reach Ms. Zeng or Ms. Zhen. The Third Affiliated Hospital of Guangzhou Medical University, where Ms. Zeng works, said in an email on Thursday the researcher “has never been to Wuhan to fight the epidemic,” and cited an editors’ note from The Lancet about the reasons for the retraction.

Chinese censors pull the popular game Plague Inc. from App Store.

China’s internet censors have removed a game from the local version of Apple’s app store that allows players to create a lethal viral epidemic that spreads across the world.

Ndemic Creations, the developer of the game, announced on its website on Thursday that the authorities had pulled Plague Inc. for violating Chinese laws. The British-based company said it received a notice that the game “includes content that is illegal in China as determined by the Cyberspace Administration of China.” Ndemic said it wasn’t clear whether the move was related to the coronavirus outbreak.

The company said it was reaching out to Chinese officials to find out how it could bring the game back. “We have a huge amount of respect for our Chinese players,” it said, “and are devastated that they are no longer able to access and play Plague Inc.”

Plague Inc. became one of the most popular paid apps in China after the Wuhan outbreak. In the game, users can create a disease, choose the country where it originates and select the way it spreads, like transmission via animals, insects or water. Players accumulate points in the form of DNA that they can spend to make their disease more contagious or lethal. “You will get more DNA as you infect and kill people across the globe,” the game’s tutorial tells players.

Ndemic, which says the game has over 130 million players around the world, had previously defended Plague Inc. as a way to educate people about how diseases spread. “We specifically designed the game to be realistic and informative, while not sensationalizing serious real-world issues,” it said on its website last month.

Online, some Chinese players said they found the decision puzzling.

“All these years it was legal, now suddenly it is illegal?” wrote one Weibo user. Another writer added, sarcastically, “the best way to conquer fear is to not look at what you’re afraid of.”

U.S. workers were sent into quarantine area unprotected and unprepared, complaint says.

Federal government health workers were not given proper medical training or protective gear when they were sent to assist Americans who had been quarantined for possible exposure to the coronavirus, according to a whistle-blower complaint.

Staff members entered quarantine areas at Travis Air Force Base and March Air Reserve Base in California, interacted with the people who were in isolation and then moved freely around and off the bases, the complaint said.

The whistle-blower, described as a senior leader at the Department of Health and Human Services, said at least one worker stayed in a nearby hotel and left California on a commercial flight.

Many of the health workers were unaware of the need to test their temperatures three times a day, the person said. The complaint was submitted to the Office of the Special Counsel, and a portion was obtained by The New York Times.

The employees were not given training in safety protocols until five days after they were ordered into quarantined areas, including a hangar where evacuees from coronavirus hot zones in China and elsewhere were being received, the whistle-blower said.

The first U.S. case of coronavirus infection in a patient with no known risk factors — travel to a hot zone or contact with another person known to be infected — emerged this week near Travis Air Force Base.

In a statement on Thursday, the Department of Health and Human Services acknowledged the complaint, saying, “We take all whistle-blower complaints very seriously.”

New York may have its first case, city officials say.

New York City officials said on Thursday they had a possible coronavirus patient and were sending a sample for testing to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. The patient had respiratory symptoms and had recently traveled in Italy, which has emerged as a hub of the coronavirus, health officials said.

Health officials said the patient was under 50, but provided few other biographical details. This was the first suspected case in New York City since the C.D.C. expanded its testing criteria to account for the spread of the virus in a number of countries beyond China, including Iran, Italy, Japan, and South Korea.

New York City has had no confirmed cases of the virus so far. Seven patients had previously been deemed potential cases, only to be ruled out after testing.

Reporting and research was contributed by Russell Goldman, Abdi Latif Dahir, Choe Sang-Hun, Keith Bradsher, Alexandra Stevenson, Elaine Yu, Tiffany May, Karen Zraick, Wang Yiwei, Andrew Das, Jamal Jordan, Heather Casey, Joseph Goldstein, Jesse McKinley and Ian Austen.