'Our names will live in infamy': Mayor of Wuhan offers to resign over virus response

The mayor of the city where the coronavirus outbreak began offered to resign and said his handling of the epidemic was “not good enough.”

Mayor Zhou Xianwang, mayor of the Chinese city of Wuhan, said that he and the local Communist Party chief Ma Guoqiang would be willing to step aside over their response to the now-global outbreak of coronavirus.

“If people want to pursue accountability [about the lockdown] and the public has a strong opinion, we are willing to step down,” Zhou said.

Zhou locked down Wuhan, a city of 11 million people, after the infection began to gain steam. He defended his decision to do so as a way of stopping the spread of the illness to other provinces and countries, although it has still spread to every single region of China and to over a dozen countries.

More than 9,700 people have been infected and 213 have died from the respiratory illness as of Friday, with 5,806 of the cases occurring in Hubei province where Wuhan is located.

Zhou said his administration has done an “unsatisfactory” job of disclosing information about the outbreak.

“Our names will live in infamy, but as long as it is conducive to the control of the disease and to the people’s lives and safety, Comrade Ma Guoqiang and I will bear any responsibility,” Zhou said, according to the New York Times.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced Thursday that there has been a case of the virus spreading from one person to another in the United States. Also Thursday, the World Health Organization declared the burgeoning outbreak a global public health emergency.