A Chinese man died in the Philippines Sunday after likely contracting the new coronavirus originating in Wuhan, China, exacerbating outrage at President Rodrigo Duterte for being slow to limit travel from affected areas into the country.
Duterte, an obstinate ally of the Chinese Communist Party despite Filipinos’ overwhelming distaste for Beijing, refused for much of the initial time after China warned the world it had identified a new virus to limit entry to people who had been to Wuhan to the Philippines. He finally instituted a ban from individuals from Hubei province, whose capital is Wuhan, in Friday, over a week after the Wuhan government instituted a complete shutdown in travel into or out of the city. On Monday, after the man’s death in his country, Duterte expanded the ban to prohibit non-Philippine citizens from entering the country if they had traveled to all of China.
President Donald Trump instituted the same ban – on non-citizens who had recently traveled to China – on Friday in the United States in response to growing concern over the spread of the new coronavirus.
Manila revealed early Sunday local time that an unidentified 44-year-old Chinese man who had recently flown to the country from Wuhan died on Saturday of pneumonia. According to the Philippine Star, the man’s wife was the first documented case of coronavirus in the Philippines, tested after they both arrived from the virus’s originating city. The man reportedly also contracted a strain of influenza while suffering from the new coronavirus, exacerbating the respiratory infection caused by the first virus.
The two join dozens of suspected coronavirus patients. One particularly concerning case revealed last week was of a 24-year-old man who died of pneumonia whose tests have not yet returned conclusively. The man was an HIV carrier, which likely complicated his illness, coronavirus carrier or not.
The late man is not a confirmed coronavirus patient. Philippine authorities told reporters on Sunday that they did not have enough testing kits to check, but that his wife was tested and confirmed to be carrying the virus, so the government is “for sure” documenting his death as part of the coronavirus outbreak, Philippine Department of Health officials said. They also insisted that, as the one confirmed case and the other highly suspected were both individuals from Wuhan, there is no evidence of human-to-human transmission of the virus in the Philippines.
The Department of Health confirmed it would move to cremate the man’s body as soon as possible as it is not yet known if recently deceased people are contagious at the same rate as the living.
As of Monday, the Department of Health said it was monitoring 80 people in the Philippines who are exhibiting signs of carrying the virus or otherwise are believed to have possibly been exposed to it. Of those, Health Secretary Francisco Duque III said that 67 are in isolation and another ten have been “discharged but under strict monitoring,” suggesting tests have come back negative but doctors are not confident enough to fully clear them. A larger number, 30 people, were confirmed to have tested negative for the virus. The remainder’s results are pending.
As the virus had not been identified before December, testing systems have yet to be perfected. In China, one man underwent four tests for novel coronavirus before testing positive, despite showing symptoms.
The novel coronavirus, like all categorized “coronaviruses,” causes respiratory infection. Common symptoms include fever, difficulty breathing, body aches, and coughing.
The news of the Wuhan man’s death in the Philippines triggered outrage, as – given that he had not received a positive test result for being a carrier, he was not counted statistically as a case – the public was only aware of one case in the country. Health officials suddenly revealed not just that a second case existed, but that the patient had died. Then Duque, the health secretary, also revealed that the couple had traveled to three islands in the Philippines before being identified as patients, potentially exposing a significant percentage of the country’s population.
Outrage had already begun to stir within a week of the Chinese government announcing the existence of the virus – which occurred nearly a month after Beijing privately alerted the World Health Organization (WHO) of the outbreak. Duterte and his administration repeatedly rejected the idea of a travel ban and openly admitted that he feared the Chinese Communist Party would be offended by one.
“[It is hard to say that] you suspend everything because they are not also suspending theirs and they continue to respect the freedom flights that we enjoy,” Duterte said a week ago.
Duque similarly said that China “might question why we’re not doing the same for other countries that have reported confirmed cases of a novel coronavirus” if the Philippines instituted a travel ban.
Last Thursday, Duterte began changing his tune, stating, “if there is the slightest possibility that a contamination could occur in the Philippines, then we will have to take measures. … What we can do is to limit the people entering [the Philippines]. It could include China but at this time, I am not for it. It would not be fair.”
A day later, he imposed a limited travel ban only on Chinese nationals coming from Hubei province and other affected places in China. All 31 provinces of China have documented cases of coronavirus. Following the revelation that a man had likely died after contracting the virus in Wuhan – and two days after Trump – Duterte expanded his ban to have it mirror the American ban. Anyone without Philippine citizenship who has traveled to China, Hong Kong, or Macau within the last two weeks cannot enter the Philippines until further notice.
Panelo emphasized that “no Filipino, thank God” had contracted the virus at press time.
As of Monday, the World Health Organization (WHO) has cataloged 17,385 cases of coronavirus, the overwhelming majority in China. Including the Chinese man in the Philippines, 361 people have died in the current outbreak, only one of them outside of China.