Second Miramar evacuee diagnosed with coronavirus. No sign of illness at Travis so far
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced Wednesday that a second U.S. evacuee quarantined at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar has tested positive for the new coronavirus, bringing the number of cases in the United States to 14.
The agency said the two individuals were housed in separate facilities on the base, and there was no epidemiological links between the two. They returned to the United States on separate State Department-chartered flights from China’s Hubei province, the epicenter of the new coronavirus outbreak.
“At this time. there is no indication of person-to-person spread of this virus at the quarantine facility,” said Dr. Chris Braden, the CDC’s on-site team lead, “but CDC will carry out a thorough contact investigation as part of its current response strategy to detect and contain any cases of infection with this virus.”
Other evacuees were quarantined at Solano County’s Travis Air Force Base and at Riverside County’s March Air Reserve Base, but on Tuesday, the March evacuees got word that their quarantine had been lifted and they could leave. That group was composed of roughly 200 diplomatic workers and their families who had been quarantined for 14 days.
None of the evacuees are allowed to have any contact with personnel at the military installations. All their needs are attended by the staff or contractors with the U.S. Department of Health and & Human Services. County health and CDC officials have emphasized that point because military personnel at the March reserve base have been harassed by people accusing them of spreading new coronavirus, now formally known as COVID-19.
Riverside County Health Officer Cameron Kaiser issued a letter to the community, telling residents to cut it out.
“We have heard your concerns about the evacuees on the base. Many of these concerns are reasonable,” Kaiser wrote in an open letter to the Riverside County community dated Monday, ahead of the end of the quarantine Tuesday. “Unfortunately, some people with these concerns have taken them out on the families and households of people of March Air Reserve Base. ... A few base workers have even been accosted in uniform. This is unacceptable and needs to stop.”
In Solano County, officials had hospitalized five evacuees showing symptoms like that of the new coronavirus since they landed at Travis last week, but all have tested negative for the deadly illness.
“They did not test affirmative for coronavirus and they returned to the base,” said Gerald Huber, Solano’s director of Social and Health Services.
Four of the evacuees were among the 201 who landed Friday at the base near Fairfield. They were sent to hospital and quickly placed in isolation where the CDC and other health workers monitored them for symptoms.
By Tuesday afternoon, the four, and a fifth patient – a child who developed fever aboard the first flight to Travis on Feb. 5 – were determined not to have coronavirus symptoms and were returned to Travis to complete their quarantine, Huber said.
CDC officials added that passengers quarantined at Travis total 233 instead of a previously reported 234. One of the passengers was being screened and counted twice daily because of a clerical error.
In total, more than 600 people remain under quarantine, CDC officials said in a prepared statement. They also cautioned that there could be more cases of coronavirus among the evacuees and in other people recently returned from China. Public health officials have told employers that any workers recently returning from Hubei should confine themselves to their home and call county health officials if they have any symptoms of COVID-19: coughing, fever and shortness of breath.
No one among the 195 people under federal quarantine at the Riverside County base tested positive for novel coronavirus and posed no risk to the public, said Riverside County health officials. Two children who were hospitalized were found not to carry the virus and have since recovered.
Confirmed cases of the new coronavirus continue to rise. The virus has now claimed nearly 1,366 lives, and there have been 60,239 cases reported. Of the 14 cases in the United States, eight have been in California.
The vast majority of those with the virus live in mainland China where an outbreak of the illness was first spotted in December. University of California, Davis researchers told The Sacramento Bee it’s possible that isolated cases of the virus had occurred prior to the outbreak because a Chinese study found that one person diagnosed in the original outbreak had no connection to a market that other individuals had visited. Like its deadlier cousins SARS and MERS, COVID-19 is linked to a virus found in bats.
This story was originally published February 12, 2020 at 10:43 AM.
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