Chinese media: 2 infants infected with coronavirus
Reports of infants infected with the deadly new coronavirus is a troubling new element confronting the global medical community combating the outbreak, experts say.
Chinese media reported that two infants have tested positive for the virus that has killed more than 630 people across the country. One of the children, just 30 hours old, is the youngest known case of the virus. China’s state-operated CCTV quoted hospital officials as saying the child may have been infected in the womb.
The World Health Organization said it had heard the report of “vertical transmission” but could not confirm it. Neither could Nancy Messonnier, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases.
“It would be pretty unusual,” Messonnier said at a news conference
Wednesday.
William Haseltine, a former Harvard Medical School professor who recently returned from the central Chinese city of Wuhan, told USA TODAY he had never heard of a coronavirus infection from the womb.
“However the infant is infected, it is certainly worrisome,” Haseltine said. “The lungs in infants that young are not fully formed, putting them at greater risk than an adult.”
Ogbonnaya Omenka, a public health specialist at Butler University’s College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences, said such transmission is so rare it is impossible to assess likely outcomes in such cases. He said other infection possibilities include the health care personnel involved in the delivery and the mother post-delivery, since she was positive for the virus before giving birth.
“We know that pregnant women suffer worse outcomes than the general population in the event of an epidemic,” he said. “In this infant coronavirus case, it needs to be determined whether the transmission occurred while the baby was in the womb. If it is confirmed, then it would definitely introduce the need for additional clinical and public health response strategy.”
Also Wednesday, two chartered flights carrying about 350 Americans fleeing the coronavirus outbreak landed at Travis Air Force Base in Northern California.
The latest evacuation plane to land at Travis carried 178 passengers, most of them Americans, who were immediately quarantined at the base under orders from the Department Health and Human Services.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officials said one child aboard the plane had a fever and was taken to a local facility for observation and evaluation, but officials cautioned there was no immediate sign that coronavirus was involved.
The evacuees will be confined to housing at the base for 14 days. The passengers ranged in age from 2 to 65 years.
They were whisked through passport control and taken by bus to the base where they were given one room per family and were asked to maintain “social distancing” from other families of six feet during the two weeks.
The Trump administration declared a public health emergency Jan. 31, barring entry of foreign nationals coming from China and ordering 14-day quarantines for travelers from China’s Hubei province.
In Geneva, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus unveiled a $675 million preparedness and response plan to protect nations with weak health systems.
“My biggest worry is that there are countries today who do not have the systems in place to detect people who have contracted with the virus, even if it were to emerge,” Tedros said.