13th US Virus Case Confirmed In San Diego; China Fires 2 Top Health Officials Over Botched Response

A 13th case of the Wuhan coronavirus has been confirmed in the US after one of the Americans who traveled to California from the epicenter of the outbreak on an evacuation flight last week has been determined to have contracted the virus.

Like with cockroaches, where there is one case of coronavirus, there will likely be more, especially since the patient traveled on a long-haul flight with dozens of others, increasingly the likelihood that at least some of them were infected. The State Department chartered four flights to rescue more than 800 Americans who had been trapped in Wuhan by the quarantine passed by Chinese officials on Jan. 23. One American who apparently opted to stay behind in Wuhan has succumbed to the virus, according to Chinese officials.

Even more alarmingly, the evacuee was accidentally mistakenly released from UC San Diego Medical Center, though she wasn’t released to the public: All evacuees will spend 14 days on designated military bases being repurposed as quarantines. The case was the first in San Diego.

Initially, the hospital reported that four patients undergoing testing at the hospital had tested negative for the virus, and they were discharged and returned to federal quarantine at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar, where more than 200 evacuees are staying. However, “further testing revealed that one of the four patients tested positive for 2019-nCoV,” CDC officials advised San Diego Public Health on Monday morning, and the person was returned to hospital” for observation, the hospital said in a statement.

The CDC said it’s tracing all of the individual’s contacts since arriving in the US, Reuters reports.

“CDC is conducting a thorough contact investigation of the person who has tested positive to determine contacts and to assess if those contacts had high risk exposures.”

Most US-China flights have been suspended by the White House, and only a handful of American nationals arriving on commercial flights from China have been quarantined under rules imposed on Feb. 2 to curb the virus’s spread.

There are now at least 3 cases of the virus diagnosed in California.

One of the private jets that carried Americans back from Wuhan

Out of eight states that have set up airport screenings for the virus, only six of them said they had no one under quarantine, while NY said it had 4 and Illinois aid it had a “tiny” number.

In China, the scapegoating continued on Tuesday as Beijing fired two of the most senior health officials in Hubei just hours after officials reported 108 new deaths from the virus on Monday, the first time a daily death toll has topped 100. Only 2 of the more than 1,000 deaths occurred outside mainland China.

Zhang Jin, the Communist party boss of the provincial health commission in Hubei, and its director Liu Yingzi were removed by decree of the party yesterday.

In their stead, senior Beijing official Chen Yixin has been sent to Wuhan to lead virus-suppression efforts at the crisis’s ground zero. Chen, a former deputy party chief in Hubei, will be deputy head of a central government group dispatched to the province.

Additionally, 3 senior Wuhan officials have been summoned to Beijing to explain their failings, according to state media reports cited by the SCMP.

Authorities were accused of playing down the extent of the outbreak in early January because they wanted to project an image of stability.

Wuhan authorities also faced criticism for going ahead with an annual public banquet for 40,000 families just days before the city was placed on lockdown, according to the Daily Mail. Beijing is of course trying to deflect attention from the senior Party leadership’s failures – failures that are implicit in their policies which guarantee the suppression of information during crises. However, the death of Dr. Li Wenliang late last week made it almost inevitable that the locals in Wuhan and Hubei would be punished – after all, it was Wuhan police who initially reprimanded Dr. Li for his warnings about the outbreak. Warnings that, if heeded, would have helped save hundreds of lives.

A top Red Cross official in Wuhan was also removed for dereliction of duty earlier this month. Local officials have faced an intense backlash almost since the beginning, once it had become clear that the virus had been allowed to spread within Wuhan without police or health authorities doing anything to stop it.

“Right now I’m in a state of guilt, remorse and self-reproach” said the official in an interview with CCTV last month.”

“If strict control measures had been taken earlier, the result would have been better than now.”

In South Korea, Reuters reports that the first confirmed coronavirus patient is returning to Wuhan (apparently despite the lockdown) after being discharged by the South Korean medical team that treated her.

While searching through virus-related headlines this morning, we stumbled on a telling example of Beijing’s strategy of extreme media censorship after its brief experiment with ‘openness’ provoked widespread public rage Consider this contrast: A doctor who helped lead the fight against SARS in Hong Kong warned Tuesday that nCoV could infect “60% to 80%” of the global population if left unchecked. While on the mainland, the state media reported that another veteran SARS fighter named Zhong Nanshan, the Chinese government’s senior medical adviser, is claiming that the outbreak is peaking right now.

In an interview with Reuters, the 83-year-old scientists who helped fight the SARS epidemic said his model showed the virus should peak in the middle of February.

Echoing comments from President Trump, the scientist added that he hoped the virus would peter out by April.

“I hope this outbreak or this event may be over in something like April,” he said in a hospital run by Guangzhou Medical University, where 11 coronavirus patients were being treated.

“We don’t know why it’s so contagious, so that’s a big problem,” added Zhong, whose previous forecast of an earlier peak turned out to be premature. He said there was a gradual reduction in new cases in the southern province of Guangdong where he was, and also in Zhejiang and elsewhere.

Finally, the man from Brighton believed to be the ‘super spreader’ linked to 11 cases involving a French ski chateau has broken his silence, according to the Guardian.

His name is Steve Walsh, he’s 53 years old, and this is his story:

“I would like to thank the NHS for their help and care – whilst I have fully recovered, my thoughts are with others who have contracted coronavirus.”

“As soon as I knew I had been exposed to a confirmed case of coronavirus I contacted my GP, NHS 111 and Public Health England.”

“I was advised to attend an isolated room at hospital, despite showing no symptoms, and subsequently self-isolated at home as instructed.”

“When the diagnosis was confirmed I was sent to an isolation unit in hospital, where I remain, and, as a precaution, my family was also asked to isolate themselves.”

“I also thank friends, family and colleagues for their support during recent weeks and I ask the media to respect our privacy.”

Over in Hong Kong, dozens of residents of a housing complex in Hong Kong have been quarantined after two people living on separate floors were infected with the virus, raising the possibility that it might have been traveling through the pipes.

Per local officials from Hong Kong’s Center for Health Protection, the decision to partially evacuate the building was made after investigators discovered an unsealed bathroom pipe in the apartment of a 62-year-old woman found to be infected. She lives 10 floors below another resident who was found to be infected, the NYT reports.

Yesterday, we reported that the Westerdam cruise ship had finally been granted permission to dock in Thailand after being turned away from three other countries, despite having ZERO confirmed nCoV cases aboard. Now, Thailand has rejected it, leaving it once again adrift. The ship is set to run out of food and other essentials in just two days.