Bay Area has highest concentration of cases

With four of the United States’ 11 confirmed cases, Northern California as of Monday had become home to the highest concentration of the coronavirus that is spreading across the globe, a distinction that public health officials say they have been preparing for given the region’s close ties to China.

Santa Clara County Health Officer Sara Cody said she wasn’t surprised Friday as she announced the first confirmed case in the Bay Area found in a local man who had returned from traveling in China, where the disease outbreak originated.

In the days since, a second Santa Clara County case and two more in neighboring San Benito County have been confirmed, including the second-known case of person-to-person transmission within the U.S.

“We are a large county, and many of our residents travel frequently for business and personal reasons,” Cody explained Friday. “We’ve been preparing for this possibility for weeks, knowing that we were likely to eventually confirm a case.”

The situation is rapidly evolving. Most of the 17,000 cases worldwide have been in China, where more than 300 people have died from the virus since the outbreak erupted in the city of Wuhan.

But the Philippines over the weekend confirmed the death a 44-year-old man there from Wuhan — the first fatality outside of China — and his 38-year-old female companion, also from Wuhan, has also tested positive for the virus and was hospitalized in Manila.

In the U.S., two cases have been confirmed in Southern California in addition to the four in Northern California. Two have been confirmed in Illinois and one each in the states of Washington, Arizona and Massachusetts.

In the Bay Area’s Chinese American communities, fears are running high. At Pacific Rim Plaza in north

San Jose, business has been down all weekend at restaurants and shops, retailers say.

Henry Pei, who owns a vitamin supplement store called Healthsource U.S.A. at the strip mall on Hostetter Road, posted handwritten signs in Mandarin on the door and at the counter of his shop warning people to stay away if they have been to China over the past two weeks.

“Business has almost stopped,” said Pei adding that face masks and hand sanitizer are selling out everywhere. “Everyone is scared.”

At the beauty parlor next door, hair stylist May Yip says she’s especially worried being in such close physical contact with her customers, and she doesn’t like wearing a mask because it’s hard to breathe.

“All my clients are Asian,” Yip said. “I ask if they’re just back from China. “You can’t ask everyone, sometimes they’ll get mad.”

Yip, who is 65, worries she and her family may be more vulnerable. She told her sister, who was in China before a two-week layover in Korea, to wait another week until she comes in for a hair appointment.

“I told her, you better stay home,” Yip said. “It’s so scary because I’m older and it usually kills older people, right?”

At a travel agency across the street, people are not just canceling trips to and from China, but canceling flights to New York and four-day bus tours to Las Vegas and back.

At Ranch 99 market next door, a list is posted of all the symptoms of Coronavirus and how to help stop its spread. All the employees are now required to wear masks and rubber gloves and follow a long list of rules, including frequently washing their hands.

“Everybody is taking care,” said Ping Lu, the market’s assistant manager.

The U.S. has undertaken extraordinary measures to slow the spread of the virus in North America, barring entry to most non-citizens who visited China in the past two weeks.