Coronavirus – Desperate villagers in China arm themselves with spears and dig up roads to stop sick escaping quarantine
CHINESE locals in towns bordering the Wuhan coronavirus epicentre have built roadblocks and armed themselves with spears in a bid to stop potential virus carriers from escaping quarantine.
Images circulated on social media show distressed natives resorting to desperate measures such as destroying roads and carrying weapons to prevent residents from the largely quarantined Hubai providence from fleeing into their communities.
One video released by Chinese video news outlet Pear shows the village of Yichuan in Henan Province, which borders Hubei on the northern side, using a digger to secretly destroy a road in the middle of the night.
Another clip captures the road, also said to be in Henan, firmly blocked by mud.
A signboard was placed on top of the obstruction and it reads "new type of pneumonia, control and prevention of the outbreak, no through traffic".
In a third piece of footage, Henan village officials are seen blasting messages with loudspeakers, banning the locals from having gatherings or visiting relatives and urging them to wear face masks.
revealed several Chinese villages have taken it upon themselves to concrete walls to barricade themselves and stop outsiders.
similarly reported on makeshift roadblocks and locals banding together to work to contain the spread of the coronavirus.
Handwritten signs on streets read "No outsiders allowed in", with other villages sticking red tape across community entrances, and some even building entire walls out of brick.
Village members wearing face masks and high-visibility vests manned the blockades and monitored anyone suspected of coming from outside.
The unofficial travel restrictions comes amid growing distrust in the Communist Party to properly protect citizens from the spread of the fatal virus, considered highly contagious but whose existence the Chinese government only admitted in late January.
The central government on Tuesday issued an order to ban local officials from setting up checkpoints and block roads without authorisation.
And on Monday China's state newspaper, CCTV, urged its citizens not to discriminate against people from Hubei.
Workers in the city of Wuhan are frantically building its second coronavirus hospital as the country desperately tries to contain the accelerating outbreak
The deadly coronavirus has killed at least 169 people - all in China – with experts warning cases of the fatal infection is likely to peak in 10 days.
At least 6,168 worldwide coronavirus cases have been confirmed since it was first noted in late December.
The virus – in the same family as the virus responsible for the SARS pandemic that killed nearly 800 people in 2003 - originated in Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province.
While some experts believe coronavirus is not as deadly as SARS, there are fears over it spreading quickly and key features are still unknown, including how lethal it really is.
It has so far been spread to 18 other countries and regions.
The intensifying outbreak has led authorities to quarantine at least 56 million people in Hubei Province, including its capital city Wuhan, and halted all means of transport going in and out of many of its cities.
British Airways announced it has halted all its flights to and from China - as the Government's urgent plans to evacuate Brits from the outbreak epicentre of Wuhan are being finalised.
The Government has advised against "all but essential" travel to mainland China due to the coronavirus outbreak.
Experts have warned the deadly bug will become a worldwide pandemic if governments do not impose heavy global travel bans.
Where did coronavirus start? From bats to snakes - the theories on deadly virus' origins
The killer coronavirus was spread from bats to snakes to humans, experts have claimed.
An outbreak of the virus is understood to have started at an open air fish market in the Chinese city of Wuhan - which has since been put in lockdown after 25 people died and more than 600 people were infected globally.
A new study published in the China Science Bulletin this week claimed that the new coronavirus shared a strain of virus found in bats.
Previous deadly outbreaks of SARS and Ebola were also believed to have originated in the flying mammal.
Experts had thought the new virus wasn't capable of causing an epidemic as serious as those outbreaks because its genes were different.
But this latest research appeared to prove otherwise - as scientists scrabble to produce a vaccine.
In a statement, the researchers said: “The Wuhan coronavirus’ natural host could be bats … but between bats and humans there may be an unknown intermediate."
Meanwhile, scientists at Peking University also claim that the deadly virus was passed to humans from bats - but say it was through a mutation in snakes.
The researchers said that the new strain is made up of a combination of one that affects bats and another unknown coronavirus.
They believe that combined genetic material from both bats and this unknown strain picked up a protein that allows viruses bind to certain host cells - including those of humans.
After analysing the genes of the strains the team found that snakes were susceptible to the most similar version of the coronavirus.
It meant that they likely provided a "reservoir" for the viral strain to grow stronger and replicate.
Snakes are sold at the Huanan Seafood Market in central Wuhan and may have jumped to other animals before passing to humans, they claim.
But a senior researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, who asked not to be named, said the findings should be treated with caution.
He told the : “It is based on calculation by a computer model.
“Whether it will match what happens in real life is inconclusive.
“The binding protein is important, but it is just one of the many things under investigation. There may be other proteins involved.”
The expert believes that the new strain was an RNA virus, meaning that its mutation speed was 100 times faster than that of a DNA virus such as smallpox.
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