CALIFORNIA EMERGENCY DECLARED AS VIRUS SPREADS
State reports first death as symptoms swirl on cruise ship off coast
Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency as California confronted a deepening sense of crisis over the spread of the coronavirus Wednesday, when an older patient in the Sacramento area died from the virus and a cruise ship carrying 21 people with symptoms was held off the coast of San Francisco.
The person who died, in Placer County, was the 11th death linked to the virus in the United States and the first outside of Washington state. The patient had underlying health conditions and was most likely exposed to the virus last month during international travel that included a cruise to Mexico, officials said.
Eleven passengers and 10 crew members who are still on that ship, the Grand Princess, were showing symptoms Wednesday, Newsom said in an evening news conference. “That number may
significantly understate” the scope of infection, he said, or “it may indeed be abundance of caution.” Public health officials prepared to screen everyone aboard the ship, which was not allowed to return to shore, Newsom said.
The Grand Princess is owned by Princess Cruises, the same company that runs the Diamond Princess, a coronavirus-stricken cruise ship that was quarantined off the coast of Japan last month.
Among the new California cases of coronavirus announced Wednesday were six in Los Angeles County: three people who had traveled together in Northern Italy; two relatives who had been in contact with a family member who previously tested positive; and a medical contractor for the Department of Homeland Security, whose job included screening passengers at Los Angeles International Airport.
Italy, meanwhile, closed all schools and universities and barred fans from all sporting events for the next few weeks, joining other governments around the world in trying to curb the spread of the coronavirus.
With the virus present in more than 80 countries, Saudi Arabia barred citizens from making the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, Iran canceled Friday prayers for a second week, and leader after leader pleaded with citizens to put an end to that traditional symbol of mutual trust, the handshake.
The Italian government decreed that soccer games and other sporting events will take place without spectators until at least April 3. Italy is is the epicenter of Europe’s coronavirus outbreak. More than 3,000 have been infected and at least 107 have died, the most of any country outside China, where the illness began.
Italy also closed schools for 8.4 million students through March 15, after at least four other countries — Japan, the United Arab Emirates, Lebanon and Iraq — took similar action.
In Tokyo, Japanese Olympic Minister Seiko Hashimoto suggested that the Tokyo Games could be postponed by a few months from the planned July 24 opening and still meet a contract agreement with the International Olympic Committee.
In the U.S., federal health officials announced Wednesday that anyone who wants a coronavirus test may get one if a doctor agrees. But the nation’s testing capacity is still so limited that experts feared clinics and hospitals could be overwhelmed by an avalanche of requests.
Under the new criteria, patients who have fevers, coughs or difficulty breathing qualify for diagnostic testing, depending on their doctor’s judgment. But with flu season in full swing, tens of millions of Americans have respiratory symptoms, and doctors have no way to discern who should be tested.
The Trump administration has repeatedly promised to expand the nation’s testing capabilities by the end of the week, even as state laboratories estimated that it would be weeks before millions of American could be tested.
“We are already overwhelmed with calls day and night,” said Dr. Julie Vaishampayan, public health officer of Stanislaus County in Modesto, adding that health laboratories in California are already working seven days a week.
In Washington, President Donald Trump sought to def lect criticism of his administration’s response to the coronavirus, complaining that a federal agency decision under President Barack Obama had made it harder to quickly enact widespread testing for the virus.
“The Obama administration made a decision on testing that turned out to be very detrimental to what we’re doing, and we undid that decision a few days ago so that the testing can take place in a much more accurate and rapid fashion,” Trump said. “That was a decision we disagreed with. I don’t think we would have made it, but for some reason it was made. But we’ve undone that decision.”
It was not entirely clear what Trump was referring to. Health experts and veterans of the government during Obama’s presidency said they were unaware of any policy or rule changes during the last administration that would have affected the way the Food and Drug Administration approved tests during the current crisis. Moreover, if there were, Trump did not explain why his administration did not change the rules during its first three years in office.
Meanwhile, officials in
California said they had traced all six Los Angeles County cases to known exposure sources. Federal officials said they could not say whether the airport screener had contracted the virus while working or as a result of the virus spreading in the community.
Three more cases in Santa Clara County were also announced, and the many developments represented a significant escalation of the situation in California, which has had at least 54 cases of the virus, the most of any state. Officials in Los Angeles County — with 10 million residents, the largest county in the nation — declared a state of emergency, warning that the number of confirmed cases was likely to rise.
“This is a call for preparedness,” Dr. Barbara Ferrer, director of the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health, said at a news conference Wednesday. “Know what you might do should we see an explosion of cases.”
While seeking to tamp down public anxieties, officials also warned that a worsening spread of the coronavirus could potentially lead to a grim new reality. Officials could order “extreme measures of social distancing.” Major sporting events could be played without spectators. Schools could shut down.
“This is the time for people to have a plan for what they would do should their
child’s school need to close,” Ferrer said.
Dr. Jonathan Fielding, a public health expert at UCLA, said that the number of cases in California, a large state that is a frequent entry point for travel from Asia, was likely to rise, particularly as officials increase their capacity to test and diagnose cases.
“What was unfortunately predictable has now come into direct line of consciousness for many people who were hoping it would not happen,” said Fielding, who previously worked as the public health director for Los Angeles County. He added, “It’s very likely that it’s going to get worse before it gets better.”
The 11 deaths in the United States are a fraction of the more than 3,000 deaths that have been traced to the virus worldwide. Early estimates of the coronavirus death rate from China, the epicenter of the outbreak, have been around 2 percent. On average, seasonal flu strains kill about 0.1 percent of people who become infected.
The first coronavirus deaths in the United States were reported over the weekend in King County, Wash., which includes Seattle.
On Wednesday, officials announced that a 10th person had died in Washington state, as ramped-up testing offered troubling evidence of how widely the virus had spread.