Washington (AFP) – The US on Friday issue a rare federal quarantine order of 14 days for 195 Americans who were evacuated from the Chinese city at the center of a global virus epidemic that has killed more than 200 people.
It is the first time in 50 years the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has issued such an order, and the two-week period began the day they left Wuhan, said senior CDC official Nancy Messonnier.
“This legal order is part of an aggressive public health response, the goal of which is to prevent as much as possible community spread of this novel virus in the United States,” she said.
A plane carrying the evacuees landed at the March Air Reserve Base in Riverside, California, on Wednesday and officials initially said passengers would be asked to voluntarily isolate themselves for three days.
They submitted samples for testing at the CDC headquarters in Atlanta. Not all of the results are back yet, but even a negative result for the 2019 Novel Coronavirus does not necessarily mean a person is out of danger, added Messonnier.
The latest move came after one individual tried to leave the base and was placed under quarantine by the state of California, said a second CDC official, Marty Citron, but he denied that that event had been the impetus.
The CDC said a quarantine order is for people who have been exposed to a disease but are not yet sick.
“The last time that quarantine was used for a suspect case was in the 1960s for smallpox evaluation,” he added.
The US has told its citizens to avoid China after the World Health Organization declared a global coronavirus emergency, as the Chinese death toll rose Friday to 213 and total infections surpassed the SARS epidemic of two decades ago.
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