SFO to screen passengers for illness

U.S. health officials announced Friday that they will begin screening airline passengers arriving in San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles from central China for a new virus that has sickened dozens and killed two, prompting worries about a new international outbreak.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officials say they will begin taking temperatures and asking about symptoms of passengers at the three U.S. airports who traveled from the outbreak city of Wuhan.

Officials estimate roughly 5,000 passengers will go through the process in the next couple of weeks at New York City’s JFK International Airport, Los Angeles International Airport and San Francisco International Airport.

More than 40 cases of the newly identified coronavirus have been confirmed in Asia, including two deaths. Officials have said it probably spread from animals to people but haven’t been able to rule out the possibility that it spreads from person to person.

So far, the risk to the American public is deemed to be low, but the CDC wants to be prepared and is taking precautions, Dr. Martin Cetron said.

The CDC said the airport screenings are part of an effort to better detect and prevent the virus from the same family of bugs that caused an international outbreaks of SARS and MERS that began in 2002 and 2012.

The only time the CDC has done airport screenings was in 2014, when health officials screened thousands of passengers from three West African countries for Ebola but detected no illnesses.