Society

For Adele Jiang, 24, a previously “recovered” coronavirus patient in China, the past two months have been a nightmare. Jiang, a master’s student in the central Chinese city of Wuhan, was diagnosed with Covid-19 in late January. She was deemed recovered and discharged from the hospital a month later, but was sent back to the hospital after testing positive for the virus again while being monitored at an isolation facility. Her experience highlights the potentially long and difficult road to recovery for coronavirus patients and the stress this could put on any country’s health care system. While there are no national numbers for patients like Jiang, health authorities in the southern province

As Americans react to the spread of the coronavirus, it’s not just toilet paper and groceries being snapped up by panicked customers. It’s guns too. Stores across the US have in the past month recorded a surge in firearm and ammunition sales. Ammunition retailer ammo.com reported a 2.8 times sales rise on March 10.   Some gun shoppers in California and Washington, the states with the largest initial outbreaks, are Asian-Americans buying guns for the first time, as they observe a rise of coronavirus-related attacks on Asians in the US.  The coronavirus was first reported in the Chinese city of Wuhan. That fact has been used as justification for blaming people of Chinese and Asian descent for

Satellite images provided by Planet Labs, a company operating Earth-imaging satellites, show empty sites around the world as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.

China’s efforts to get people back to work are being hampered by a labyrinth of quarantine measures that remain in place despite the country having nearly eliminated local transmission of the coronavirus. “Every city has a different set of rules,” a 36-year-old businessman in Hubei province, the early epicenter of the outbreak, told Inkstone on Thursday. “My city has not had new cases for nearly 20 days. But other provinces don’t care about that.”  The man, who only gave his name as Andy, is one of the millions of Chinese workers who traveled to their hometown before the Lunar New Year in January to celebrate the occasion with their families.  But while new cases of the Covid-19 disease have

China has threatened more curbs on US media operating in the country after saying it will expel journalists from three American newspapers. “China called on the US to stop suppressing Chinese media. If the US continues to be on the wrong track, China will be forced to take further countermeasures,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said Wednesday.  The Ministry said on Tuesday it was revoking the press credentials for American journalists from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, describing it as a response to the Trump administration’s recent measures against Chinese state media outlets in the United States. Washington last month labeled five Ch

What started as a potentially lucrative business trip for one Hongkonger and a dream honeymoon for another ended in a Russian detention nightmare for both after they were accused of breaking the country’s quarantine laws. In an ordeal lasting three weeks, a businessman trying to buy surgical masks and bring them back to Hong Kong, who gives his name as Sky, describes being held in a dirty, crowded cell in Moscow before his deportation to mainland China. He was briefly detained in the mainland before he returned to Hong Kong, where he had to undergo a compulsory quarantine. A similar trauma befell another Hong Kong resident – a newlywed who is also now back in the city after visiting Russia

After nearly two months of lockdowns, strict quarantine rules and travel restrictions, life is slowly returning to normal in China as the coronavirus outbreak – which has infected more than 81,000 people and claimed more than 3,200 lives in the country – starts to wind down. Workers are gradually returning to their jobs and there is at last relief for medical staff on the front line, as the number of new patients falls and the condition of others improves. Schools, factories, public spaces and tourism destinations are starting to reopen.  In northwestern Qinghai province, which mostly sits on the Tibetan plateau, China’s first batch of 144 high schools and secondary vocational schools reopen

As China’s coronavirus crisis appears to wane and infections elsewhere in the world rise, the message from Beijing is that some countries in the West have been too slow to react and have not done enough to contain the pandemic. The World Health Organization (WHO) announced on the weekend that Europe was the new epicenter of the pandemic, a mantle that had previously hung over China, where the pathogen first emerged. The number of cases has exploded in countries such as Spain, which now has almost 8,000 reported infections, and Italy, with more than 24,000. Western governments have rushed to introduce containment measures as the number of cases in the rest of the world surpassed the total in

During the Lunar New Year, Hong Kong resident Guo Yongfeng returned to the Chinese mainland to visit his hometown of Harbin, the capital of the northeastern province of Heilongjiang. But the outbreak of Covid-19 on the mainland meant that he was required to spend 14 days in self-quarantine upon his return to Hong Kong. But Guo lives in a cubicle in a subdivided housing unit known as a “cage home,” and found it impossible to completely isolate himself until he managed to get a bed in a government quarantine facility.

Friends of Ren Zhiqiang, the Chinese former property tycoon and outspoken critic of the country’s ruling Communist Party, are concerned about his whereabouts after losing contact with him for several days. The 69-year-old has been out of touch since an article he wrote criticizing the way in which Chinese authorities responded to the coronavirus outbreak was widely circulated online, they said. “I haven’t been able to reach Ren Zhiqiang since Thursday night … it’s been over 72 hours already,” Wang Ying, an entrepreneur and friend, said. Zhang Ming, a history professor at Renmin University in Beijing, said he too had been unable to contact Ren. “A citizen can’t just disappear, we need to know