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Australians flown home from Wuhan, China, will be quarantined on an island for two weeks. Americans, also evacuated from Wuhan, will be “temporarily housed” on an air base in California. And in South Korea, the police have been empowered to detain people who refuse to be quarantined. For countries outside China, the time to prevent an epidemic is now, when cases are few and can be isolated. They are trying to seize the moment to protect themselves against the coronavirus outbreak, which has reached every province in China, sickening more than 7,700 people and killing 170. (Grady, 1/29)

The person-to-person spread of the new coronavirus in three countries - Germany, Vietnam and Japan - is worrying and will be considered by experts reconvened to consider declaring a global emergency, the World Health Organization said on Wednesday. (1/29)

It is for governments to decide whether to evacuate their nationals from Wuhan, the Chinese city at the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Wednesday. (1/29)

The World Health Organization's Emergency Committee will meet on Thursday, the third time in a week, to evaluate whether the new coronavirus spreading from China now constitutes an international emergency, the WHO said. "The Committee will advise the Director-General on whether the outbreak constitutes a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC), and what recommendations should be made to manage it," the WHO said in a statement issued in Geneva ahead of a news briefing by senior WHO expert Mike Ryan on return from China. (1/29)

An emergency declaration by the WHO would allow the agency to begin coordinating government responses. It also could recommend travel and trade restrictions to stop the spread of the infection. But MacIntyre pointed out that the regulations aren’t enforceable. (Gale, 1/29)

The leaders of the World Health Organization on Wednesday praised China’s response to the ongoing outbreak of a novel coronavirus that emerged there and has since spread to more than a dozen other countries, and said the agency would again convene its expert committee to weigh whether the outbreak amounts to a global health emergency. There have been reports from China questioning whether the country has been accurately documenting all deaths tied to the outbreak and how prepared it was to handle an emerging pathogen. But WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who had just returned from meeting with Chinese leaders in Beijing, including President Xi Jinping, told reporters Wednesday that Chinese officials had shown they were committed to combating the transmission of the virus and demonstrated cooperation with other countries to stem its global spread. (Joseph and Thielking, 1/29)

Chinese scientists racing to keep up with the spread of a novel coronavirus have declared the widespread outbreak an epidemic, revealing that in its early days at least, the disease’s reach doubled every week. By plotting the curve of that exponential growth and running it in reverse, researchers reckoned that the microbe sickening people across the globe has probably been passing from person to person since mid-December 2019. Scientists in China are also closing in on the source of the aggressive new germ — bats. (Healy, 1/29)

Health officials in China, racing to try to contain a fast-growing coronavirus outbreak, are principally recording severe cases of disease, using a case definition that cannot capture patients with mild illness, according to experts familiar with the surveillance efforts. The approach, the experts told STAT, is likely resulting in both an underestimate in the total number of cases and flawed assumptions about fatality rates calculated by those who ignore the repeated caution that it’s too soon to do that math. (Branswell, 1/30)

The world is quickly realizing how much it depends on China. Apple is rerouting supply chains. Ikea is closing its stores and paying staff members to stay home. Starbucks is warning of a financial blow. Ford and Toyota will idle some of their vast Chinese assembly plants for an extra week. On Wednesday, British Airways and Air Canada suspended all flights to mainland China, and Delta joined the growing number of carriers reducing service. (Stevenson, 1/29)