The coronavirus is fuelling tensions in protest-racked Hong Kong

“THERE IS NO reason for measures that unnecessarily interfere with international travel and trade.” So declared the World Health Organisation’s chief, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, on February 3rd after several countries, to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, had closed their borders with China or (like America and Australia) announced that foreign citizens who had recently visited China would be barred from entering. Yet many people in Hong Kong want the territory to seal itself off from the Chinese mainland. Their demands are putting new political pressure on the territory’s leader, Carrie Lam, after months of pro-democracy unrest.

As The Economist went to press, 21 people in Hong Kong had been detected with the virus, of whom seven were from the mainland. Six of the others were Hong Kong residents who caught it while travelling in China. They included a man whose death, attributed to the virus, was announced on February 4th. It was the first such fatality in the territory and only the second outside the Chinese mainland (the other was in the Philippines). The remaining eight cases involved infections that occurred in Hong Kong itself.