As China and nearby nations deal with the massive challenge of stemming the outbreak, travelers wearing masks, quarantine stations and temperature checkpoints are becoming common sights at airports and other travel hubs across Asia.
Eric Rubin, Editor-in-Chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, says as the nation at the center of the epidemic, "China has the primary role in gathering information," and he said the country's local and national health authorities had thus far "done a very responsible job."
The number of known infections has risen sharply since yesterday, topping 300 across China alone. At least 15 hospital workers in Wuhan have been diagnosed with the virus — none of whom were believed to have been directly exposed to the city's seafood and animal market considered ground zero for the epidemic.
"If in fact a person who is infected has infected a healthcare worker, that's obviously of some concern," Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease at the National Institutes of Health, told CBS News.
Fauci said the human-to-human transmissions could be isolated incidents, but "when you get sustained transmissibility from one person to another to another to another, then you have a more serious problem because then that would allow for a much broader type of an outbreak."
The World Health Organization has said it will assemble an emergency committee of experts, expected to meet Wednesday to decide whether the outbreak yet constitutes a global emergency, and how to contain it.
