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Coronavirus Live Updates: China’s Xi Jinping Visits Outbreak’s Center in Sign of Confidence – The New York Times, Nytimes.com

Coronavirus Live Updates: China’s Xi Jinping Visits Outbreak’s Center in Sign of Confidence – The New York Times, Nytimes.com

As Italy restricted travel across the country, Xi Jinping, the Chinese leader, visited Wuhan, the city where the global outbreak began. China signaled that it would begin easing some travel restrictions around Wuhan.

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State news media said Mr. Xi met with front-line medical workers, military personnel, community workers, police officers and officials.

Image Xi Jinping, the Chinese leader, visiting a lab in Beijing last week . He had led efforts to control the outbreak from the capital, only visiting Wuhan on Tuesday. (Credit … Ju Peng / Xinhua, via Associated Press

Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, visits Wuhan for the first time since the outbreak erupted there.

The Chinese leader Xi Jinping arrived on Tuesday in Wuhan, visiting the center of the global coronavirus epidemic for the first time since the outbreak began and sending a powerful signal that the government believes the worst of the national emergency is over.

Mr . Xi’s visit was reported in a brief bulletin from Xinhua , the main official news agency, which said he met with front-line medical workers, military personnel, community workers, police officers and officials.

His trip is sure to be seen as a sign that China’s leaders believe that a series of draconian restrictions, including the lockdown of hundreds of millions of people starting in late January, have brought the outbreak under control.

According to official data , coronavirus infections have recently receded in China, falling to a few dozen new cases every day, nearly all of them in Wuhan, the provincial capital.

On Tuesday, China said it recorded 45 new infections from the coronavirus, and deaths, in the past 60 hours. All but two of the newly confirmed infections were in Wuhan, the central Chinese city where the virus originated. The remaining two infections were people who contracted the virus after traveling abroad.

Wuhan remains the source of most new infections, even as the overall number of cases has fallen. More than three quarters of the 3, 288 deaths recorded in China were in the city of million people.

In Wuhan, most residents remain under heavy restrictions. But growing numbers of neighborhoods across the city have been declared free of new infections, and officials have said that the last two makeshift isolation centers for patients with mild cases of coronavirus infection (would close) .

(Italy says it’s halting most travel and public gatherings to try to restrain the outbreak.)
The Italian government on Monday night extended restrictions on personal movement and public events to the entire country in a desperate effort to stem the coronavirus outbreak – an extraordinary set of measures in a modern democracy that values ​​individual freedoms.

Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte announced in a prime-time news conference that public gatherings were banned and that people would be allowed to travel only for work or for emergencies.

Those r estrictions had been placed on the “red zone” created in northern Italy, covering about million people, but Mr. Conte extended them to an entire nation of 90 million.

“We all have to renounce something for the good of Italy,” said Mr. Conte, saying that the government would enact more stringent rules over the entire Italian peninsula.

Italy has recorded more than 9, 06 coronavirus infections and 691 deaths – well over half the toll for Europe – and the numbers continue to climb fast.

Hubei Province, at center of the outbreak, hints at lifting some travel restrictions.

While the coronavirus prompts shutdowns and economic alarm across the world, the Chinese province where the epidemic began announced that it would – ever so carefully – restart business and manufacturing.

Leaders in Hubei Province, the source of the global outbreak, laid out plans on Monday after the province recorded a significant fall in the daily number of new infections and deaths from Covid – , the disease caused by the virus.

Ying Yong, the province’s highest-ranking official, said the government would lift travel restrictions in areas of low risk to allow workers to get to their jobs. The risk level for each area of ​​the province would be rated and those in low-risk areas would soon be allowed to travel.

Since January, much of Hubei has been under a lockdown that has deterred tens of millions of residents from moving around, or even leaving their homes.

“Currently, epidemic containment in Hubei Province has been shown promising developments and a sustained positive momentum, but the tasks of prevention and control remain arduous, ”Mr. Ying told officials, according to the official Hubei Daily on Tuesday .

At the same time, Mr. Ying added, the province would “advance the planning so that people can move around in a safe and orderly way and enterprises can revive production.”

Mr. Ying did not spell out what would happen in Wuhan, the provincial capital, but his wording suggested that the city would remain cordoned off for now, even if the rest of Hubei loosened up.

President Trump has been promising the imminent arrival of a vaccine to halt the spread of the coronavirus.

Federal health officials have repeatedly pointed out that his timetable is off – it will take at least a year – but Mr. Trump’s single-minded focus on warp-speed production of a new vaccine represents a striking philosophical shift.

For years, he was an extreme vaccine skeptic who not only blamed childhood immunizations for autism – a position that scientists have forcefully repudiated – but once boasted he had never had a flu shot.

At least a decade before Mr. Trump was elected president, with responsibilities that would include nominating experts to lead the nation’s health centers, the hotelier and commercial developer was holding forth with great confidence about medical topics. When an interviewer would note that physicians disagreed with the dim view he took of vaccines, Mr. Trump remained ever ebullient, impervious and dismissive of scientific authority.

Now, as his federal health agencies tackle the rapidly morphing coronavirus epidemic and he and his administration come under fire for serious missteps in managing it , Mr. Trump has had to adjust his messaging. He is now all in on a vaccine and the sooner the better, says the man who in 3420 said that he didn’t “like the idea of ​​injecting bad stuff in your body.”

Europe’s likely recession will be a big test for its leaders. (

Europe had already been teetering. toward trouble.

Even before the coronavirus outbreak quarantined the

and emptied the teeming streets of Venice, before France banned public gatherings and major trade shows were canceled in Germany and Spain, economists were openly warning about the prospect of an economic downturn across the continent.

Now, Europe is Almost certainly gripped by a recession, amplifying fears that the global economy could be headed that way, too.

“It seems pretty difficult to avoid a recession in the first half of the year,” said Ángel Talavera, head of European economics at Oxford Economics in London. “The spread of the disease in Europe is a game changer. The question is how deep it will be, and how long it will last. ”

As the world absorbs the consequences of Europe sinking into a slump just as China suffers a profound downturn , the sense of alarm is heightened by another question with no clear answer: Can European leaders transcend their often-bitter differences to forge an effective response – especially when this crisis may be beyond traditional economic policy prescriptions?

The Saudi oil price cut is being felt around the world.

The sudden upheaval in the oil markets may claim victims around the world, from energy companies and their workers to governments whose budgets are pegged to the price of crude.

The fallout may take months to assess. But the impact on the American economy is bound to be significant, especially in Texas and other states where oil drives much of the job market.

With the coronavirus outbreak slowing trade, transportation and other energy-intensive economic activities, demand is likely to remain weak. Even if Russia and Saudi Arabia resolve their differences – which led the Saudis to slash prices after Russia refused to join in production cuts – a global oil glut could keep prices low for years.

Many smaller American oil companies could face bankruptcy if the price pressure goes on for more than a few weeks, while larger ones will be challenged to protect their dividend payments. Thousands of oil workers are about to receive pink slips.

The battle will impose intense hardship on many other oil-producing countries as well, especially Venezuela, Iran and several African nations, with political implications that are difficult to predict.

The only winners may be drivers paying less for gasoline – particularly those with older, less fuel-efficient cars, who tend to have lower incomes.

“This is a clash of oil, geopolitics and the virus that together have sent the markets spiraling down,” said Daniel Yergin, the energy historian. “The decline in demand for oil will march across the globe as the virus advances.”

Reporting was contributed by Jan Hoffman, Peter S. Goodman and Clifford Krauss.

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Updated March 9,

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