Apple to Temporarily Close Stores, Offices in China amid Virus Outbreak

Apple Inc. announced Saturday that all of its stores and corporate offices in China will be closed until February 9 due to the coronavirus outbreak.

The company provided the statement to Mark Gurman, a Bloomberg reporter who covers Apple news:

Apple is closing ALL stores, corporate offices, and contact centers in China due to Coronavirus through Feb. 9, company says in statement. https://t.co/E5xGkgAkeS pic.twitter.com/bbpGN885n4

— Mark Gurman (@markgurman) February 1, 2020

“Apple is restricting employee travel to China to business-critical situations and it issued a revenue forecast that was wider than usual due to uncertainty surrounding the virus,” according to Bloomberg.

“The company said it would also increase the cleaning of its stores and take the temperature of retail workers,” the article read.

Thursday, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a global health emergency after the virus killed 171 people in China and spread to almost 20 countries, according to Breitbart News.

“Our greatest concern is the potential for this virus to spread to countries with weaker health systems which are ill-prepared to deal with it,” said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

“This declaration is not a vote of non-confidence in China. …On the contrary, WHO continues to have the confidence in China’s capacity to control the outbreak,” he stated.

Friday, the White House announced a ban of all foreign nationals traveling to the United States who have been in China in the past two weeks, according to Breitbart News.

“The risk of infection for Americans remains low and with these and our previous actions we are working to keep the risks low,” said Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar.

However, Dr. Nicole Saphier, a board-certified physician at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, told SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily host Alex Marlow on Friday that a coronavirus vaccine was already being researched.

She commented:

There’s heightened awareness, right now. … But the truth is, by this time next year, this will again be a thing of the past, similar to what SARS was, is my guess. So to put a bunch of time and resources and effort to finding a vaccine for this one strain of a virus — although it sounds heroic, and that’s what we want everyone to be doing, right now — but the truth is, we need to contain the virus. The virus will die out, and then we’ll be onto the next virus, next year.

Dr. Saphier also predicted that coronavirus infection rates would start to decline in the next one to two months, but she urged people to take precautions.

“The same thing I would say [about] the flu: good hand hygiene, avoid sick contacts, and at this time you can’t travel to China so you’re not going to travel to China,” she concluded.