Acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf: ‘We Have No Plans for a National Lockdown or a National Quarantine’

Saturday during an appearance on Fox News, acting Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Chad Wolf outright dismissed speculation of a national lockdown or national quarantine as part of the response to the COVID-19 (coronavirus) outbreak.

Wolf urged viewers to get information from trusted sources.

“It’s simply not true,” he said. “What we see is a lot of disinformation campaigns via text, via social media. So we want to make sure that we refute those, we knock those down. I did that yesterday on Twitter. But a lot of disinformation is just that, disinformation. So again, we want to make sure that individuals are getting their information from trusted sources, so those are your state and federal officials. And we’re asking them not to spread this type of information around. So there is no — we have no plans for a national lockdown or a national quarantine. And again, it’s just that, it’s disinformation.”

Wolf also laid out other measures taken by DHS to be proactive in its response.

“We have a number of different activities underway,” Wolf said. “Obviously, we continue to screen individuals coming back from affected countries. We have travel restrictions on 30 different countries around the world. We still see flights coming back into the U.S. from those countries. So we have CBP officers. We have contract medical screeners screening those individuals. To date, we’ve screened over 220,000 individuals coming back from corona-affected areas. And we’ll continue to do that.”

“Yesterday, we just announced some additional travel restrictions regarding non-essential travel across our land borders with both Canada and Mexico,” he continued. “We are also repatriating and removing individuals coming here illegally from affected areas as well. So there’s a lot that we’re doing. I would also like to mention FEMA. FEMA has stood up their National Response Center. It’s at a level one which is their highest level. It’s a level that you would see after a natural or man-made event that FEMA does. And so FEMA is in the lead of coordinating our federal response. So there’s a lot of activities the Department is doing across the board in response to corona.”

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