Travis AFB chosen to house evacuees
As the United States continues to respond to the coronavirus outbreak that was first identified in China and has spread as far as the U.S., four military bases — including Travis — were selected to house individuals who were evacuated while traveling overseas due to the virus.
According to a Travis Air Force Base Facebook post, the base was selected to assist the Department of Health and Human Services at the request of Defense Secretary Mark Esper to provide housing for at least 250 people at four different Department of Defense installations through Feb. 29.
According to a Twitter post by Jonathan Rath Hoffman, Esper’s public affairs assistant, the other three bases were the Marine Corps Air Station Miramar in San Diego, Lackland Air Force Base in Texas and the 168th Regiment Regional Training Institute in Colorado.
“The department’s primary responsibility is the safety of our force, our families and our base communities,” Hoffman wrote.
Evacuees at Travis will be housed at the Westwind Inn hotel, base officials wrote. The base would also establish a safety cordon away from residential housing to guarantee that the evacuees may have privacy and that the health and welfare of the Travis base community can be protected.
Base officials wrote that
Health and Human Services personnel would be responsible for the care, security and transportation of the evacuees during the quarantine period and that Travis airmen and personnel would not have any direct contact with the evacuees. Likewise, evacuees will remain in their assigned housing and not have access to anywhere else on the base.
Evacuees have not necessarily been infected or exhibited signs of the illness from the coronavirus but were in the region surrounding Wuhan, China during the outbreak and are undergoing testing for symptoms.
The base also noted that individuals currently staying at the Westwind Inn were being contacted and accommodated for alternate arrangements. Future reservations, including temporary lodging, would be redirected. A reopening date has not yet been announced. In the meantime, the base advises anyone heading to stay at Travis or has a concern about their lodging situation to contact their unit sponsor or chain of command.
The base declined to comment further as it was not the lead agency handling the response. A spokesperson for the Health and Human Services department did not respond by press time.
The most recent coronavirus outbreak, designated as 2019-nCoV, was first identified in Wuhan in late 2019. As of Monday, at least 11 cases had been confirmed in the U.S., including four in Northern California.
On Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that it had issued a federal twoweek quarantine for 195 individuals evacuated from the province of Hubei. Additionally, the Department of Homeland Security has announced that flights may be rerouted to one of 20 U.S. airports for screenings if officials discover in the middle of a flight that a passenger has been in China in the last 14 days.
For more information on the coronavirus, visit cdc. gov/coronavirus/about/index.html.