Here’s where coronavirus evacuees will stay during 2-week quarantine at Travis AFB
Hundreds of American evacuees were flown from the Travis Air Force Base near Fairfield via two jetliners early Wednesday morning, where many of them will be quarantined for two weeks after being airlifted out of mainland China, the epicenter of the ongoing and deadly coronavirus outbreak.
Travis AFB is one of five military bases selected by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to be used as lodging facilities for those citizens, many of whom are diplomatic employees working overseas. The death toll of the novel coronavirus was approaching 500 worldwide as of Wednesday.
Following the nearly 12-hour flight from Wuhan, China, to Northern California, health officials have said as many as 250 of the 350 total evacuees from those two planes will be quarantined at Travis for the next two weeks, though none of the 350 had shown symptoms of the virus as of Wednesday morning.
Those who are quarantined will be accommodated at Travis’s on-base hotel, the Westwind Inn, Travis officials told base personnel in a Facebook post. A safety cordon was set to be established, to separate the quarantined community at the inn from on-base residences.
“Travis airmen and personnel will not be directly in contact with the evacuees and evacuees will not have access to any base location other than their assigned housing (at Westwind),” Travis officials said Saturday.
The Department of Defense on Saturday uploaded a 6½-minute video showcasing Westwind, where Travis officials say they are prepared to accommodate up to 1,000 evacuees from the coronavirus outbreak.
The video, which is not narrated, shows rooms and suites at the Westwind Inn. Most of the rooms appear to be standard hotel rooms, with one or two beds, a bathroom, a fridge, a microwave, limited counter and closet space and outdoor-facing windows.
The video also showed one on-site laundry room with several washers and dryers, and a Java City coffee stand in the building’s lobby. The campus itself is a four-story building, with palm trees lining the driveway of its main entrance.
Travis AFB houses the David Grant USAF Medical Center, but Pentagon officials have said that the HHS will transport any evacuees identified as ill with the virus to civilian medical facilities. The HHS has told military installations to be prepared to provide quarantine housing through the end of February.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is the lead agency responsible for quarantine procedures.
“Under the HHS request, DoD installations are only providing housing support,” a caption beneath the video of Westwind explained. “HHS is responsible for all care, transportation, and security of the passengers.”
As of early Wednesday, six cases of the novel coronavirus had been documented in California out of 11 total instances in the United States. That’s out of a total of more than 24,000 case worldwide, the large majority of them reported near the epicenter of the virus in Wuhan, mainland China.
This story was originally published February 5, 2020 at 10:28 AM.
