Santa Clara County declares first coronavirus case recovered

Santa Clara County’s Public Health Department said Thursday that the man who became the first confirmed local person infected with the deadly novel coronavirus has fully recovered and has been released from his self-isolation at home.

“He was never sick enough to be hospitalized,” county health spokeswoman Marianna Moles said. “He isolated at home and was monitored by public health staff for the duration of his isolation.”

Santa Clara County health officials had announced the the man’s confirmed coronavirus infection Jan. 31, describing him only as “an adult male resident of the county” who recently traveled to Wuhan, China, where the outbreak originated, and became ill upon returning home.

County officials said the man was seen at a local clinic and hospital but was never sick enough to require hospitalization and was “self-isolating at home” while they monitored his condition.

The man was one of two people in Santa Clara County who were confirmed to be infected with the coronavirus. Two days later, county health officials confirmed a second, unrelated novel coronavirus infection in someone they described only as “an adult female” who also had recently traveled to Wuhan and arrived Jan. 23 to visit family in the county.

Santa Clara County health officials have said she has stayed home since she arrived except for two occasions when she sought outpatient medical care, was never sick enough to be hospitalized and also has been regularly monitored. She was still under isolation Thursday, Moles said.

Moles said the county health department continues to work closely with healthcare providers, hospitals and others to monitor the novel coronavirus. Currently, she said, there is no evidence that the virus is circulating in Santa Clara County, and risk to the public remains low.

Two other Northern California cases were confirmed Feb. 2 in San Benito County, a husband and wife both age 57. San Benito County health officials said the husband recently traveled from Wuhan, but his wife did not and was believed to have been infected through him. They were later transferred to the University of California San Francisco hospital for a higher level of care.

The San Francisco Department of Public Health said Friday the couple were discharged from UCSF “in good health,” but would not say whether they had fully recovered and been cleared to resume their normal lives. Shawn Merillat, a spokesman for San Benito County’s health department, said Thursday the agency had nothing to report on the couple’s condition.

The novel coronavirus, from the same family of pathogens that caused the SARS and MERS outbreaks, has infected more than 75,000 people in more than two dozen countries and killed more than 2,000, according to the World Health Organization. The vast majority of cases and deaths from the disease WHO calls COVID-19 have been in central China’s Hubei province, which includes Wuhan.

There have been more than 1,000 infections outside of China and eight deaths from the disease — two aboard the Diamond Princess cruise ship anchored off Japan, two in Iran, and one each in the Philippines, Korea, France and Japan. An American is among the dead in China.

In the U. S., there have been 15 confirmed cases, but an additional 14 Americans evacuated from the cruise ship and flown back to the U. S. are believed to be infected.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has not responded to questions about whether any of the other confirmed coronavirus cases have fully recovered. But USA Today reported Thursday that a Washington state man who became the first confirmed U.S. novel coronavirus case also has made a full recovery and is no longer quarantined.