Coronavirus death toll, new cases in the US: 5 latest developments
2. Coronavirus spreads person-to-person for the first time in the U.S.
For the first time since the spread of the illness, authorize in the U.S. confirmed that they detected a case in which the coronavirus spread from one person to another.
It’s the husband of a 60-year-old Chicago woman who tested positive recently, about 10 days after she returned from Wuhan. Placed in isolation at Amita Health St. Alexius Medical Center Hoffman Estates, the husband is in stable condition, according to the Chicago Tribune.
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He is an employee at the development and contractor firm PIRHL, LLC, which is now working with state and city health officials to “take necessary precautions and provide information requested by them and the CDC,” according to NBC Chicago.
“This employee is based in Chicago and visited the Cleveland office on January 14th. According to the Ohio Department of Health, this individual was not symptomatic and is not considered a risk to anyone he came in contact with during his time in Cleveland,” the company said in a statement. "Upon learning of this information, immediate action was taken.”
Dr. Allison Arwady, commissioner of the Chicago Department of Public Health, said last week that the woman had been placed in isolation in a hospital but was “clinically doing well and in stable condition.”
The number of confirmed cases in the U.S. is likely to go up, Dr. Nancy Messonnier, the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, warned last week. However, she indicated there was no reason to panic as the risk to the U.S. public remained low.
According to HHS Secretary Azar, 195 Americans who were evacuated earlier this week from China’s Hubei province are being quarantined.
The medical journal The Lancet earlier said in an article based on a study that affected patients “were geographically linked with a local wet market as a potential source,” as game animals and meat are sold there.
The study “shows this new coronavirus is able to transfer between person to person, in a hospital setting, a family home setting, and also in an inter-city setting,” Yuen Kwok-yung, one of the study’s authors, told The New York Times. “This is exactly what makes this new disease difficult to control.”
