Confirmed: 11 total cases of coronavirus in United States
02/04/2020 / By Ethan Huff
It’s official: There are now 11 confirmed cases of novel coronavirus in the United States, with the three latest additions all coming out of California.
Two patients are reportedly receiving treatment for the deadly disease in San Benito County, located in the central part of the Golden State, while a third is getting medical attention in Santa Clara County near San Francisco.
The Santa Clara County patient, a woman, is reportedly being isolated and quarantined along with her family inside their home. She was apparently not sick enough to actually be admitted to a hospital.
Health officials from Santa Clara County also announced that the two patients in San Benito County are a married couple.
Thus far, there are now six confirmed cases of coronavirus in California, two in Illinois, one in Washington state, one in Arizona, and another in Massachusetts. Nobody in America has yet been reported dead from coronavirus.
There has, however, been a death from coronavirus outside of China – the first yet – in the Philippines, where a 44-year-old man reportedly died after contracting the disease from his friend while they were traveling together in Wuhan, China.
The U.S. has also now seen its first case of human-to-human transmission of coronavirus in Chicago, where one spouse reportedly passed it to the other within our borders.
Not long after the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a global public health emergency, the U.S. followed suit, as did Australia, by temporarily barring all entry into the country to non-citizens who recently traveled to China.
Multiple U.S. airlines have also temporarily suspended flights to China, while China itself has likewise restricted international travel in an attempt to contain the virus.
Health officials can’t agree on how coronavirus is even transmitted
As coronavirus continues its trek around the globe, health officials are at odds with each other over how it’s transmitted.
Here in the U.S., the claim is that there isn’t enough data to show that coronavirus transmits before an infected patient develops symptoms. But across the pond in Germany, health officials are adamant that asymptomatic transmission can and does occur.
At the order of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), all incoming flights from China will be automatically re-routed, at no cost to passengers, to one of seven airports that have been designated as screening locations to identify potentially infected individuals.
“While the overall risk to the American public remains low, funneling all flights with passengers who have recently been in China is the most important and prudent step we can take at this time to decrease the strain on public health officials screening incoming travelers,” stated DHS acting secretary Chad. F. Wolf in a recent press release.
The seven airports where incoming travelers from China are being redirected for government screening include:
• John F. Kennedy International in New York
• Chicago O’Hare International in Illinois
• Seattle-Tacoma International in Washington state
• Daniel K. Inouye International in Hawaii
• Hartsfield-Jackson International in Atlanta
• San Francisco International in California
• Los Angeles International in California
Meanwhile, Big Pharma is busy trying to develop some kind of vaccine for coronavirus, even though the earliest possible time for its release would be some time more than a year from now.
“Independent self-sustaining outbreaks [of 2019-nCoV] in major cities globally could become inevitable because of substantial exportation of presymptomatic cases and in the absence of large-scale public health interventions,” reads a paper published in The Lancet about the future of coronavirus.
“Preparedness plans and mitigation interventions should be readied for quick deployment globally.”
The latest news about coronavirus is available at Pandemic.news and Outbreak.news.
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Tagged Under: cases, China, confirmed, coronavirus, global emergency, infection, infectious disease, outbreak, pandemic, United States, US, virus, Wuhan
