Officials ponder where to dock US ship carrying virus patients
Those that will need to be quarantined will be quarantined. Those who will require medical help will receive it: Pence; Florida reports 2 virus deaths, the first in eastern US
Officials in California were deciding on Saturday where to dock a cruise ship with 21 coronavirus cases aboard and four US universities cancelled in-person classes as Western countries imitate China by imposing travel controls and shutting down public events to contain the outbreak.
The Grand Princess cruise ship was waiting off San francisco with 3,500 people aboard. authorities want it to go to a non-commercial port for everyone aboard to be tested amid evidence the ship was the breeding ground for a deadly cluster of 10 cases during an earlier voyage.
“Those that will need to be quarantined will be quarantined. Those who will require medical help will receive it,” said Vice President Mike Pence.
President Donald Trump, speaking at the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, said he would have preferred not to let the passengers disembark onto American soil but would defer to the recommendations of medical experts.
The University of Washington and two other universities said campuses in Seattle would hold classes online instead of in-person. stanford university, south of San Francisco, announced similar plans.
Also in seattle, starbucks announced an employee of one of its cafes was diagnosed with COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus. The company said the store would reopen after a “deep clean.”
Florida health authorities confirmed on Friday two deaths from the new coronavirus, the first US fatalities outside the west coast states of Washington and California.
Both had travelled abroad, Florida Department of Health said in a statement announcing the two deaths and a total of 12 confirmed COVID-19 cases in the southeast state.
They brought the US death toll to 16, including 14 reported earlier, according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Research Centre.
More than 200 people have contracted the virus in the United States. The Florida deaths were the first coronavirus fatalities on the east coast.
Colombia declared its first case of novel coronavirus on Friday after a 19-year-old woman arriving from Italy tested positive for the virus, the health ministry said.
The woman “presented with symptoms and went to the health services where samples were taken for analysis. The National Institute of Health confirmed positive test results,” the ministry said in a statement.
The woman arrived in the Colombian capital on Feb.26 from Milan, where she was studying, Bogota Mayor Claudia Lopez said on Twitter.
The student was treated on March 2 at a Bogota clinic.
“We will follow protocol and the agreed treatment,” wrote Lopez, calling for “calm, zero panic.”
Colombia is one of only a handful of Latin American countries to confirm cases to date, the others being Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Peru, the Dominican Republic, Chile and Ecuador.
Up to now no deaths have been reported in the region.
Mexican authorities on Friday said they have identified a sixth person infected with coronavirus, a 71 year-old man in the State of Mexico who recently travelled to northern Italy.
Deputy Health Minister Hugo Lopez-gatell said the man, who suffers from hypertension, arrived in Mexico in “grave condition” and is currently hospitalised in stable condition.
Lopez-gatell said two of the man’s family members have been tested to check for the infection, with the results still awaited.
China, where the disease first emerged in December, reported 99 new cases on Saturday, its first daily increase of less than 100 since Jan.20. The government reported 28 deaths in the 24 hours through midnight Friday.
China has 22,177 patients in treatment and has released 55,404. The epidemic appears to be easing in China but countries elsewhere are reporting increasing numbers of cases.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) has warned against “false hopes” that the disease will fade when warmer summer weather arrives in northern countries.
The 100,000 figure of global infections dwarfs other major outbreaks such as SARS, MERS and Ebola. The virus is still much less widespread than annual flu epidemics, which cause up to 5 million severe cases around the world and 290,000 to 650,000 deaths annually, according to the World Health Organisation.