There are now 2,744 confirmed cases and at least 80 reported deaths from the Wuhan coronavirus, including one physician treating patients—61-year-old Dr. Lian Wudong. To date, all but some 44 of the confirmed cases and all the deaths have occurred in mainland China, predominately at the center of the epidemic, Wuhan. Other cases of the infection, formally known as 2019-nCoV, or novel coronavirus, have been found in Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, Singapore, Australia, Thailand, Nepal, France and the United States.

The virus so far remains uncontained, fueling confusion, panic and rising social tensions across China, where the government has partially or fully locked down 13 major population centers, encompassing nearly 60 million people. In Wuhan, citizens are calling for their local leaders to be held accountable. Doctors on the front line of treating victims of the coronavirus infection are leading this call by bluntly declaring, “The city’s leaders should be removed immediately.” These tensions have begun to spread to Shanghai, one of China’s major commercial centers and one of its most populous cities, where an 88-year-old man died as a result of the virus, sparking concerns about the complex spread of the disease and its ramifications on an international scale. In response, Chinese President Xi Jinping was forced to state, “Confronted with the grave situation of this accelerating spread of pneumonia from infections with the novel coronavirus, we must step up the centralized and united leadership under the party central.”

In China itself, the emergency is being exacerbated by the lack of supplies. According to local medical personnel and staff, masks are running short and sanitary equipment is being quickly exhausted. Physicians, nurses and aides are on 24-hour standby, even as the travel ban within the affected cities makes commuting to hospitals difficult. This has created the added problem of making routine tasks, such as other forms of medical care and even getting groceries, much more difficult in population centers as large or larger than New York City and Los Angeles. Local hospitals have been forced to appeal on social media for donations of supplies and funds to stock and run their services.

The largely scattered efforts to contain and treat 2019-nCoV reflect the scarcity of resources devoted to medicine. According to the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2020, “Health systems around the world are at risk of becoming unfit for purpose. New vulnerabilities resulting from changing societal, environmental, demographic and technological patterns threaten to undo the dramatic gains in wellness and prosperity that health systems have supported over the last century.”

This state of affairs is not the result of new viruses evolving more quickly or a lack of advances in medical technology, but of the subordination of modern medicine to private profit. In one revealing episode, China’s vice minister of industry and information technology, Wang Jiangping, told news outlets that Hubei Province is going through more than 100,000 protective suits each day, while their manufacture lags by 30,000 per day. The sheer material needs are overwhelming the capacity to address these demands. Yet Chinese companies manufacture more than 50,000 such suits per day for export.
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