When Kem Senou Pavel Daryl, a 21-year-old Cameroonian student living in the Chinese city of Jingzhou, contracted the coronavirus he had no intention of leaving China, even if that were possible.

“No matter what happens I don’t want to take the sickness back to Africa,” he said from his university dormitory, where he is now under a 14-day quarantine.

He was suffering from a fever, a dry cough, and flu-like symptoms.

When he became ill he thought of his time as a child in Cameroon when he contracted malaria. He feared the worse.

“When I was going to the hospital for the first time I was thinking about my death and how I thought it was going to happen,” he said.

For 13 days he remained in isolation in a local Chinese hospital. He was treated with antibiotics and drugs typically used to treat HIV patients. After two weeks of care he began to show signs of recovery.

The CT scan showed no trace of the illness. He became the first African person known to be infected with the deadly coronavirus and the first to recover. His medical care was

Egypt has become the first country in Africa to confirm a case of the coronavirus. Health professionals warn that countries with weaker health systems may struggle to cope with a potential outbreak of the illness, which has led to more than 1,770 deaths and infected more than 72,000 people, mostly in China.

“I don’t want to go home before finishing studying. I think there is no need to return home because all hospital fees were taken care of by the Chinese government,” says Mr Senoua.

To evacuate or not?

Since late January governments around the world, led by the US, began evacuating their citizens out of Wuhan and neighbouring cities.

But thousands of African students, workers and families, remain in lockdown across the central Hubei province – the outbreak began in the provincial capital Wuhan – and some think their governments should do more to help them.

“We are sons and daughters of Africa but Africa is not willing to come to our rescue when we need it the most,” says Tisiliyani Salima, a medical student at Tongji Medical University and president of the Zambian Wuhan student association.

For close to a month Ms Salima has been living in self-quarantine.

Time has begun to lose meaning for the 24-year old student. She spends her days sleeping and checking updates on Chinese social media apps.

She acts as the liaison between her embassy and the 186 Zambian students living under quarantine in Wuhan. Many worry about food safety, supplies, and lack information in a city that this week has seen an average of 100 deaths a day.

She watched other international classmates evacuated from the city while her countrymen and women were left behind.

“South of the Sahara most African countries have had a similar response,” says one student who agreed to talk under the condition of anonymity.

“Publicly or privately African countries say that China can handle the situation. But the situation is not under control. When you listen to the official response it tells you that the African countries do not want to offend China. We don’t have the bargaining power,” the student says.

China is currently Africa’s largest trading partner and the ties between the two have blossomed in recent years.

In the process China has become home to 80,000 African students, many attracted to the middle kingdom by scholarship programmes. But community leaders say families, young and old are stranded in Hubei province with little aid or assistance from their governments.

“People are saying: ‘Don’t bring us back because Nigeria can’t handle us.’ I feel conflicted but at the end of the day I am also human,” says Angela, a recent graduate from Nigeria, who only gave her first name.

“I would appreciate if they would recognise that there are Nigerians here but we don’t seem to be a priority. We didn’t get any response from our government,” she says.

Last week, for the first time in 22 days in lockdown, dwindling supplies forced Angela to venture out of her apartment to buy some essentials.

“The city is like a ghost town. When I left my complex I didn’t know if I would even be allowed back in. People are checking temperatures outside the gate,” she says in a phone interview from her apartment.

On 30 January the Cameroonian community penned an open letter to the president urging their government to evacuate citizens stuck in the epicentre of the outbreak.

Weeks on Dr Pisso Scott Nseke, a community leader in Wuhan, says Cameroonians are still waiting for a response.

He accepts that the community is not united in the desire to be evacuated but says they are disappointed by the lack of assistance from the government.

As of mid-February, Egypt, Algeria, Mauritius, Morocco and Seychelles had moved their citizens out of Hubei province.

Other nations such as Ghana and Kenya are reportedly considering evacuating.

FROM BBC NEWS

Armed robbers in Hong Kong made off with hundreds of toilet rolls worth more than HKD1,000 ($130; £98).

Toilet rolls are currently in short supply in Hong Kong due to shortages caused by panic-buying during the coronavirus outbreak.

Knife wielding men robbed a delivery man outside a supermarket in the Mong Kok district, police said.

Police have arrested two men and recovered some of the stolen loo rolls, local media reports said.

The armed robbery took place in Mong Kok, a district of Hong Kong with a history of “triad” crime gangs, early on Monday.

According to local reports, the robbers had threatened a delivery worker who had unloaded rolls of toilet paper outside Wellcome Supermarket.

An Apple Daily report said that 600 toilet paper rolls, valued at around HKD1,695 ($218; £167), had been stolen.

Stores across the city have seen supplies massively depleted with long queues when new stock arrives.

Despite government assurances that supplies remain unaffected by the virus outbreak, residents have been stocking up on toilet paper.

Other household products have also seen panic-buying including rice, pasta and cleaning items.

Face masks and hand sanitisers are almost impossible to get as people try to protect themselves from the coronavirus, which has already claimed more than 1,700 lives.

“A delivery man was threatened by three knife-wielding men who took toilet paper worth more than HK$1,000 ($130),” a police spokesman said.

Authorities blame false online rumours for the panic buying and say supplies of food and household goods remain stable.

There has also been some panic-buying of toilet rolls, hand sanitisers and face masks in Singapore, which has 75 confirmed coronavirus cases.

SOURCE BBC NEWS

On a cold Beijing morning, on an uninspiring, urban stretch of the Tonghui river, a lone figure could be seen writing giant Chinese characters in the snow.

The message taking shape on the sloping concrete embankment was to a dead doctor.

“Goodbye Li Wenliang!” it read, with the author using their own body to make the imprint of that final exclamation mark.

Five weeks earlier, Dr Li had been punished by the police for trying to warn colleagues about the dangers of a strange new virus infecting patients in his hospital in the Chinese city of Wuhan.

Now he’d succumbed to the illness himself and pictures of that frozen tribute spread fast on the Chinese internet, capturing in physical form a deep moment of national shock and anger.

There’s still a great deal we don’t know about Covid-19, to give the disease caused by the virus its official name.

Before it took its final fatal leap across the species barrier to infect its first human, it is likely to have been lurking inside the biochemistry of an – as yet unidentified – animal.

That animal, probably infected after the virus made an earlier zoological jump from a bat, is thought to have been kept in a Wuhan market, where wildlife was traded illegally.

Beyond that, the scientists trying to map its deadly trajectory from origin to epidemic can say little more with any certainty.

But while they continue their urgent, vital work to determine the speed at which it spreads and the risks it poses, one thing is beyond doubt.

A month or so on from its discovery, Covid-19 has shaken Chinese society and politics to the core.

That tiny piece of genetic material, measured in ten-thousandths of a millimetre, has set in train a humanitarian and economic catastrophe counted in more than 1,000 Chinese lives and tens of billions of Chinese yuan.

It has closed off whole cities, placing an estimated 70 million residents in effective quarantine, shutting down transport links and restricting their ability to leave their homes.

And it has exposed the limits of a political system for which social control is the highest value, breaching the rigid layers of censorship with a tsunami of grief and rage.

The risk for the ruling elite is obvious from their response, ordering into action the military, the media and every level of government from the very top to the lowliest village committee.

The consequences are now entirely dependent on questions no one knows the answers to; can they pull off the complex task of bringing a runaway epidemic under control, and if so, how long might it take?

Across the world, people seem unsure how to respond to the small number of cases being detected in their own countries.

The public mood can swing between panic – driven by the pictures of medical workers in hazmat suits – to complacency, brought on by headlines that suggest the risk is no worse than flu.

The tiny proportion killed out of the many, many millions who catch it each year still numbers in the hundreds of thousands – individually tragic, collectively a major healthcare burden.

Very early estimates suggested the new virus may be at least as deadly as flu – precisely why so much effort is now going into stopping it becoming another global pandemic.

But one new estimate suggests it could prove even deadlier yet, killing as many as 1% of those who contract it.

For any individual, that risk is still relatively small, although it’s worth noting such estimates are averages – just like flu, the risks fall more heavily on the elderly and already infirm.

But China’s experience of this epidemic demonstrates two things.

Firstly, it offers a terrifying glimpse of the potential effect on a healthcare system when you scale up infections of this kind of virus across massive populations.

Two new hospitals have had to be built in Wuhan in a matter of days, with beds for 2,600 patients, and giant stadiums and hotels are being used as quarantine centres, for almost 10,000 more.

Despite these efforts, many have still struggled to find treatment, with reports of people dying at home, unregistered in the official figures.

Secondly, it highlights the importance of taking the task of containing outbreaks of new viruses extremely seriously.

The best approach, most experts agree, is one based on transparency and trust, with good public information and proportionate, timely government action.

But in an authoritarian system, with strict censorship and an emphasis on political stability above all else, transparency and trust are in short supply.

But those measures have become necessary only because its initial response looked like the very definition of complacency.

There’s ample evidence that the warning signs were missed by the authorities, and worse, ignored.