Officials confirm first US human-to-human transmission of coronavirus
The coronavirus patient is the husband of a Chicago traveler who became ill shortly after returning from Wuhan, China; Jonathan Serrie reports.
Two flights carrying American evacuees from Wuhan, China — the epicenter of the deadly coronavirus outbreak — that are slated to land sometime Friday in Texas and Nebraska, respectively, are likely to be the last State Department-chartered flights out of the city, an official told Fox News.
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“At this time, we do not anticipate staging additional flights beyond those planned to depart February 6,” a State Department spokesperson told Fox News, adding any U.S. citizens still in China “should attempt to depart by commercial means.”
The two flights are scheduled to depart from Wuhan on Thursday and are expected to land at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio and Eppley Airfield in Omaha. Some 250 passengers are reportedly on the flight to Texas while an estimated 70 passengers are on the one to Nebraska.
The news comes after two planes chartered by the State Department arrived in the U.S. on Wednesday at Travis Air Force Base in Solano County, Calif., with one later traveling onto Miramar Marine Corps Air Station in San Diego. An estimated 350 Americans were on the two flights. All passengers are subject to a 14-day quarantine — they remain in temporary housing units where they will be monitored by medical teams with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for possible symptoms of the coronavirus.
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At least four evacuees — three adults and one child — who are being temporarily housed at Travis Air Force Base in San Diego were transported to area hospitals after showing signs of coronavirus, which have been reported to include fever, shortness of breath and a cough. In an update on Thursday, officials from U.C. San Diego Health and Rady Children's Hospital-San Diego said all four patients are stable, and that test results were expected as early as Saturday.
A doctor from Rady Children's Hospital-San Diego identified the two patients at the facility as a 4-year-old girl and her father. He said the father exhibited a cough but was doing well, and that they were both being kept in isolation.
A flight carrying the first 195 U.S. evacuees from Wuhan arrived in California last week. Those passengers are under quarantine at March Air Reserve Base in Riverside County. Evacuees on all flights were screened in Wuhan before departing for the U.S., officials said.
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There are 12 confirmed cases of the novel virus in the U.S., the first of which occurred in a Washington State man who has since been released from the hospital. Six other cases have been confirmed in California, as well as one in Wisconsin, one in Arizona, one in Massachusetts and two in Illinois. No deaths have been reported in the U.S., and the large majority of cases still remain in China. Overall, some 563 people have died of the virus and more than 28,000 have been sickened worldwide.
Fox News' Alexandria Hein contributed to this report.
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