After undergoing extensive testing and a temporary quarantine in Alaska, over 200 American evacuees from Wuhan — the Chinese city where the deadly coronavirus outbreak began — have arrived in Southern California, where they will be temporarily held again to undergo additional screenings.
Amid escalating fears about the outbreak, which has prompted the Chinese government to impose a quarantine affecting an unprecedented number of people, some 56 million, the U.S. government began evacuating Americans, including 201 from the U.S. Consulate in Wuhan, who were flown on a chartered jet on Tuesday to a largely dormant airport in Alaska.
In Alaska, Center for Disease Control officials performed multiple tests on the evacuees to ensure they were not infected by the virus, which has killed more than 130 people and infected nearly 6,000 thus far.
After being cleared, the 201 passengers were flown to March Air Reserve Base in California’s Riverside County on Wednesday, where, as The Associated Press reports, they will “undergo additional health screenings in California and will be temporarily housed there for a period of time as they finish the repatriation process.”
“For many of us directly involved in this, it’s become a moving and uplifting experience,” said Alaska’s chief medical officer Dr. Anne Zink, as reported by AP. “The whole plane erupted into cheers when the crew welcomed them back to the United States.”
The arrival of the evacuees follows reports that San Francisco has activated its emergency operations center in preparation for a potential outbreak.
AP notes that before being flown to Alaska, the passengers had already undergone two screenings in China. In Alaska, they kept in isolation from the populace and were screened twice more. “One passenger received medical attention for a minor injury that happened before boarding the airplane in China, Dr. Anne Zink, Alaska’s chief medical officer, told reporters after the plane left,” AP reports.
The news agency also notes that the flight crew remained “entirely isolated from the passengers for the entirety of the flight and did not get off the plane in China, putting them at low risk.”
Nearly 6,000 people have been infected by the virus in China and more than 130 have died. Five cases of the virus have been confirmed so far in the United States, including two cases in California — the first in Orange County and the second in Los Angeles County — a case in Maricopa County, Arizona, another in Washington state, and one in Chicago, Illinois. No deaths from the virus have been reported in the U.S.
On Tuesday, The New York Times provided some updates on the virus, including the following:
- The number of confirmed cases increased to 5,974 on Wednesday, up from 4,515 on Tuesday, according to the National Health Commission.
- Most of the confirmed cases have been in the central Chinese province of Hubei, where several cities, including Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak, have been placed under what amounts to a lockdown.
- Thailand has reported 14 cases of infection; Hong Kong has eight; the United States, Taiwan, Australia and Macau have five each; Singapore, South Korea and Malaysia each have reported four; Japan has seven; France has four; Canada has three; Vietnam has two; and Nepal, Cambodia and Germany each have one. There have been no deaths outside China.
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