COVID-19 virus claims first American victim
Washington state death fans fears on West Coast Robert Jablon, Lisa Baumann and Andrew Selsky
person died in Washington state of the COVID-19 virus, officials said Saturday, marking the first such reported death in the United States.
State officials issued a terse news release announcing the death. A spokesperson for Evergreenhealth Medical Center, Kayse Dahl, said the person died in the Seattle suburb of Kirkland, but gave no other details.
Even the person’s gender was unclear. Washington Gov. Jay Inslee said the person who died was a man from Washington state; President Donald Trump said it was a woman in her late 50s, fitting the description of one of the new cases state officials had announced Friday night. That woman had recently traveled to South Korea, authorities said.
Amy Reynolds of the Washington state health department said, “We are dealing with an emergency evolving situation.”
“It is a sad day in our state as we learn that a Washingtonian has died from COVID-19. Our hearts go out to his family and friends,” Inslee said. “We will continue to work toward a day where no one dies from this virus.”
Health officials in California, Oregon and Washington state were worried about the novel coronavirus spreading through West Coast communities after confirming three patients were infected by unknown means.
Those patients – an older Northern California woman with chronic health conditions, a high school student in Everett, Washington, and an employee at a Portland, Oregon-area school – did not recently travel overseas or have any known contact with a traveler or an infected person, authorities said.
Earlier U.S. cases include three people who were evacuated from the central China city of Wuhan, epicenter of the outbreak; 14 people who returned from China, or their spouses; and 42 American passengers on the Diamond Princess cruise ship, who were flown to U.S. military bases in California and Texas for quarantining.
The number of cases in the U.S. is considered small. Worldwide, the number of people sickened by the virus is esa timated at 85,000, with the number of deaths approaching 3,000, most of them in China.
In other developments:
Iran is preparing for the possibility of “tens of thousands” of people getting tested for the virus as the number of confirmed cases spiked again Saturday, underscoring the fear at home and abroad over the outbreak in the Islamic Republic.
The virus and the COVID-19 illness it causes have killed 43 people of 593 confirmed cases in Iran, Health Ministry spokesman Kianoush Jahanpour said.
Officials in Ecuador confirmed the first case of the new coronavirus in the South American nation and Mexico reported two more to raise the country’s total to four.