WHO director-general Tedros Ghebreyesus traveled to Beijing and met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping to discuss the outbreak, which is centered in Wuhan, Hubei Province. Chinese regime officials have ordered the lockdown of Wuhan and most other cities across Hubei in an attempt to quarantine the area, affecting tens of millions of people. Most forms of transportation have been banned.

“Our greatest concern is the potential for the virus to spread to countries with weaker health systems, and which are ill-prepared to deal with it,” Ghebreyesus said Thursday. “I am declaring a public health emergency of international concern over the global outbreak,” he remarked.

“The vast majority of cases outside China have a travel history to Wuhan, or contact with someone with a travel history to Wuhan,” he said, adding that there have been no deaths outside of China.

The declaration of a Public Health Emergency of International Concern has only been done five times in the past decade, including outbreaks of Ebola in Africa, the Zika virus outbreak, and the 2009 swine flu outbreak. The coronavirus is in the same family of viruses as SARS or the common cold.

WHO describes the move as “an extraordinary event which is determined to constitute a public health risk to other States through the international spread of disease and to potentially require a coordinated international response.”

Travel Restrictions in Debate

During the press conference, Ghebreyesus said the agency “opposes any travel measures against China,” adding that “we don’t punish” the Chinese government, which according to the WHO chief is “doing more than it is required to do.”

Since the escalation of the outbreak, other countries and regions have imposed varying degrees of travel and trade restrictions with China in an effort to stem the spread of the disease.

Some around a dozen countries have either closed borders or imposed visa or other travel restrictions to China. Tech giants such as Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook have also told their staff not to travel to and from the country.

U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) dismissed the idea that travel restrictions constitute a form of punishment.

“Shutting down travel to China isn’t ‘punishing China’—it’s protecting our own citizens,” he told The Epoch Times in an email.

“The United States must immediately shut down commercial air travel between our country and the Chinese mainland,” he said.

Several major airlines confirmed they would suspend some or all flights to China, including United Airlines, American Airlines, British Airways, Delta Air Lines, and Lufthansa. Starbucks also shut down half of its China branches in concerns of the illness.

The State Department and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have called on Americans to avoid “nonessential travel” to China and cautioned citizens not to go to Hubei Province.

“[The WHO] went to great lengths to praise China’s efforts so far to bring the epidemic under control, I think they are at great pains to say: do not penalize China do not cut off trade do not cut off travel,” Laurie Garrett, a global health policy analyst who won a Pulitzer prize for her coverage of the 1995 Ebola outbreak, told The Epoch Times. . .

(Excerpt from The Epoch Times. Article by Eva Fu and Jack Phillips.)

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