At least 24 of the 135 passengers now confirmed to have the virus are Americans.

Ambulances have been seen transporting some of those infected patients to hospitals in Tokyo.

To date, the Corona virus has killed 910 people are on the role.

That means more people have now died from this virus, then from the entire SARS outbreak.

Back in 2003.

For the first time today, Chinese President Xi Jinping was seen wearing a mask, one of those face masks while visiting a hospital in Beijing.

Or international correspondent David Culver Is there David, Hey there, Poppy and Jim.

You mentioned President Xi Jinping's visit out in public.

This is significant because we have not seen him surface through really much of this entire crisis.

There was one appearance about a week or so back, but it wasn't really relevant to what was going on here with the day to day fight.

This massive outbreak so today's visit was to a local community was to a hospital was to a disease control center, and it's interesting the timing of this for two reasons.

One is it comes as you may make that mention of coming past the death toll from SARS in 2003.

That was a significant moment here, and so to go past that now globally in the number of those killed.

Well, that's something that, from a PR perspective, China certainly wants to push back against in show that they still have this under control and that they're still trying to go forward with what they like in two, almost a war like a battle, if you will.

And so who did they put on the front lines in state media?

This has certainly been echoed.

But President Xi himself, now president, she has also taken kind of, ah, backseat publicly, it seems, because of some of the negativity that has surrounded this, you've got to remember where this originated.

It was at the local level.

It was in the city of Wuhan.

It was who Bay Province.

So early on, you had a lot of negativity thrown at those local leaders.

But then the central government stepped in.

President, she became really the one who said, I'm taking command of deployment and coordination, and when he did that, it stops at him.

And so when some of the negative headlines start to surface, the concern here from state media in particular and the propaganda machine doesn't like this either, is that you start to blur the two lines of some of the issues and President Xi.

So they like to buffer that.

That's why it was so important to see him come forward today and to actually be out there in public and really try to stress, in his words, that they're trying to stabilize this fight.

They're trying to stabilize the economy, too, and they're determined to go forward.

But Jimmy Pop, it's also worth noting that going around here, you start to Seymour of the state surveillance, something that China has certainly pushed forward.

But you see that just going into regular apartment complexes and it's everywhere.

Yeah, I mean, we saw those drones talking to people floating over their heads.

David Kovar Thanks very much.

We're joined now by science journalist and author Laurie Garrett.

She won the Pulitzer Prize for her work documenting the Ebola outbreak in Zaire in the 19 nineties.

Author of the book The Coming Plague.

Laurie Gary.

Thanks very much for coming on.

So we have the news now that the death toll from this has now surpassed stars and what struck me a difference is huge jump in global air travel between now and then.

I think we've seen this.

It's it's doubled.

Its more than doubled during that time frame in 3 2691 million global passengers, now 1.4 billion.

I think we have that number to put up on the screen, but tell me how that makes a difference in the spread of this.

But also, how does it explain the global response?

Jim, I was thinking that back in 2003 with the SARS epidemic, I was in Beijing and I reported some information for CNN and it was censored, and no one in all of Asia could see that information.

It was the first time they've ever blocked all CNN transmissions across the Asian region.

Uh, and here we have a situation where China is much more integrated into the planet.

They have this building road initiative that goes to already more than 60 nations.

They have a reach into sub Saharan Africa, which was completely cut off from China in 2003.

Um, and we see that slowly different parts of the planet are starting to realize, you know, this could come here and they're starting to talk about readiness.

I fear there too late that everybody's dragging their feet and getting ready for this.

And I think this is going to really explode.

Goodness, it's out of control in China.

That's alarming it.

ISS.

And what does that mean for the United States?

Because there have not been reports of, I think, any new cases, at least in the last few days here in the United States.

What is that indicative of to you?

Well, one thing that's great in the United States is that R C.

A.

CDC managed to make a good test kit to figure out who's infected.

It works in about 4 to 5 hours time once you have a patient and a sample to test so and they've now disperse that out, too.

Health departments all over the United States.

So the good news is, as cases appear, we should be able to much more rapidly figure out is this real or not real?

Is this person infected or not infected?

That's good news.

And if we can identify and in fact a case quickly and put them in isolation away from the rest of the community and not in a situation where they might contaminate a whole hospital as happened with stars and has apparently been one of the key features of this outbreak in China, then I think we may be able to buy ourselves time to really get the country together.

Tell us about the death toll here.

Because stars had a alarmingly high death rate of about 10%.

H one n one.

There were similar concerns, but much smaller well, well below 1%.

Do we have a sense here of just how deadly this is?

We're getting tremendously variant answers to that question.

Geez, there are accusations that officials in Wuhan have been manipulating data in order to have the data reconcile with a 2% case fatality rates.

So if you only report so many cases right, and then you have a fatality rate, then somehow it comes out at 2%.

Interesting.

Very different city On the other side of China, that is having a huge outbreak.

Reports of 4.8% case fatality rate.

And, of course, everybody's going to be watching these cruise ships, particularly the one off Yokohama to see you know what actually unfolds with these people and is this sort of a Petri dish to study the epidemic has a hole, and to understand what the mortality rate iss Laurie, thank you for that.

I think we're sort of sobering, sobering comments, but we're gonna stay on top of the story.

We can, thank you very much.