Topline: New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said during a Sunday CNN appearance that “if we don’t get more ventilators in the next 10 days, people will die who don’t have to die” as the city—now the epicenter of the U.S. coronavirus epidemic—faces a possible shortage of medical supplies.
“We’re about 10 days from seeing widespread shortages,” de Blasio said, adding, “We have seen next to nothing from the federal government at this point.”
De Blasio also said that the military hasn’t been mobilized by the Trump administration, and that the Defense Production Act, which the president invoked by executive order Wednesday, has not been put into motion.
“It feels like we’re on our own at this point,” de Blasio said, adding that April would be worse for New York City than March has been, and he fears May could be even worse.
CNN also reported Sunday that Federal Emergency Management Agency head Peter Gaynor could not provide a number of how many medical masks were in the federal stockpile or how many have been shipped to state and local governments.
In a sign of demand on medical supplies, a Friday letter from a New York-Presbyterian Hospital department head said each employee would only be given one N95 mask (when it typically uses 4,000 per day).
Big number: 300 million. That’s how many masks could be needed for healthcare workers versus the current stockpile of 30 million, as testified to Congress by Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar at the end of February.
Key background: The Defense Production Act is intended to be used by Trump to obtain “health and medical resources needed to respond to the spread of Covid-19, including personal protective equipment and ventilators.” Trump faced questions Thursday around his reticence to use the Defense Production Act to compel companies to produce healthcare items to combat the coronavirus, one day after he said he’d be invoking its powers. The New York Times reported Thursday that both the U.S. and countries abroad are facing a shortage of ventilators, with manufacturers saying that they can’t increase production to meet the demand.
Tangent: Tesla CEO Elon Musk volunteered his company’s factories to manufacture ventilators, but it’s unclear whether that will move forward.
I’m a New York-based journalist covering breaking news at Forbes. I hold a master’s degree from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Previous bylines: Gotham Gazette, Bklyner, Thrillist, Task & Purpose and xoJane.
Topline: As the coronavirus pandemic wipes out markets, closes schools and colleges, suspends major conferences, sports leagues and cultural events as well as upends the travel industry, businesses losing out on cash flow have started laying off workers.
Here’s who’s axed staff so far:
Norwegian Air said Thursday that it would temporarily lay off up to 50% of its workforce (and suspend 4,000 flights) due to the pandemic.
50 employees of music and culture festival South By Southwest were let go after this year’s event was canceled, the Washington Post reported.
The Port of Los Angeles let go of 145 drivers after ships from China stopped arriving.
Christie Lights, an Orlando, Florida, based stage lighting company, laid off 100 employees.
HMSHost, a Seattle, Washington, global restaurant-services provider said it would lay off 200 people and an area corporate shuttle service would lay off 75, HuffPost reported, while an area hotel chain eliminated an entire department, according to the Post.
Travel agencies in Los Angeles, California, along with Atlanta, Georgia, had to let employees go as the pandemic battered their industry.
Aid workers in Las Vegas are reportedly seeing a surge in requests for food assistance and other help as events and trade shows get canceled.
What to watch for: If any U.S. airlines end up laying off workers. Delta Airlines said Tuesday it was cutting flights and freezing hiring. American Airlines is also cutting flights, and delaying trainings for new flight attendants and pilots. Reuters reported Thursday that jobless claims are down for the week, but coronavirus-related layoffs are likely on the horizon.
Big number: 2,352 points. That’s how far the Dow Jones Industrial Average plummeted Thursday, which is a 10% drop. The S&P 500 fell 9.5%, while the Nasdaq Composite sank 9.4%.
Key background: There are now more than 1,300 reported coronavirus cases in the U.S. and at least 38 deaths, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. Worldwide cases now amount to almost 128,000 infected and more than 4,700 dead. Meanwhile, Congress is in conflicted talks over a coronavirus relief bill that may not pass this week, while New York and other state governments begin to implement bans on large gatherings to stem the spread of disease. Cancelations of concerts, sports leagues, festivals, religious gatherings and other large events have impacted millions of people. At least 135 colleges have so far canceled in-person classes. On Wednesday night, President Trump announced a 30 day travel ban from Europe (excluding the U.K. and Ireland) that sent airlines and travelers scrambling to adjust.
I’m a New York-based journalist covering breaking news at Forbes. I hold a master’s degree from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Previous bylines: Gotham Gazette, Bklyner, Thrillist, Task & Purpose and xoJane.
(LONDON) — As cases of the coronavirus surge in Italy, Iran, South Korea, the U.S. and elsewhere, many scientists say it’s plain that the world is in the grips of a pandemic — a serious global outbreak.
The World Health Organization has so far resisted describing the crisis as such, saying the word “pandemic” might spook the world further and lead some countries to lose hope of containing the virus.
“Unless we’re convinced it’s uncontrollable, why (would) we call it a pandemic?” WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said this week.
The U.N. health agency has previously described a pandemic as a situation in which a new virus is causing “sustained community-level outbreaks” in at least two world regions.
Many experts say that threshold has long been met: The virus that was first identified in China is now spreading freely in four regions, it has reached every continent but Antarctica, and its advance seems unavoidable. The disease has managed to gain a foothold and multiply quickly even in countries with relatively strong public health systems.
On Friday, the virus hit a new milestone, infecting more than 100,000 people worldwide, far more than those sickened by SARS, MERS or Ebola in recent years.
“I think it’s pretty clear we’re in a pandemic and I don’t know why WHO is resisting that,” said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.
Experts acknowledge that declaring a pandemic is politically fraught because it can rattle markets, lead to more drastic travel and trade restrictions and stigmatize people coming from affected regions. WHO was previously criticized for labeling the 2009 swine flu outbreak a pandemic. But experts said calling this crisis a pandemic could also spur countries to prepare for the virus’s eventual arrival.
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WHO already declared the virus a “global health emergency’ in late January, putting countries and humanitarian organizations on notice and issuing a broad set of recommendations to curb its spread.
Even in countries that moved quickly to shut down their links to China, COVID-19 has managed to sneak in. Within a matter of weeks, officials in Italy, Iran and South Korea went from reporting single new cases to hundreds.
“We were the first country to stop flights to China and we were completely surprised by this disease,” said Massimo Galli, an infectious-diseases professor at the University of Milan. “It’s dangerous for the entire world that the virus is able to spread underground like this.”
With more than 3,800 cases, Italy is the epicenter of Europe’s outbreak and has shut down schools, closed sports stadiums to fans and urged the elderly not to go outside unless absolutely necessary. But it has still exported cases of the virus to at least 10 countries, including Austria, the Czech Republic, Spain, South Africa and Nigeria.
Devi Sridhar, a professor of global public health at the University of Edinburgh who co-chaired a review of WHO’s response to the 2014-16 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, said a pandemic declaration is long overdue.
“This outbreak meets all the definitions for a pandemic that we had pre-coronavirus,” she said.
At a news conference last month, Dr. Mike Ryan, WHO’s emergencies chief, said a pandemic is “a unique situation in which we believe that all citizens on the planet” will likely be exposed to a virus “within a defined period of time.”
Several experts said they hadn’t heard that definition. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for its part, defines a pandemic as “an epidemic that has spread over several countries or continents, usually affecting a large number of people.”
The Associated Press receives support for health and science coverage from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
By now, we’ve all seen the pictures and read the headlines. Coronavirus is real and its impact is growing.
How concerned should we be about the chance of infection? That’s difficult to say, but one thing is for sure: panic is not the answer.
Unfortunately, that’s exactly what we tend to do in situations like these. Flawed judgment takes over. We overreact. We suspect that we might already be infected. We prepare for the worst. Irrational impulses drown out level-headed thinking.
In fact, there is a lot of psychological research to explain how and why this happens. Below are three cognitive biases that make us perceive the threat of Coronavirus as worse than it actually is.
#1: Things that are easily imagined are judged as more likely to happen.
Have you ever worried about being attacked by a shark? If the answer is yes, you are not alone. Almost everyone who swims in the ocean has, at some point, imagined the threat of a shark attack. Why? Not because the odds are high, but because we’ve seen the movie Jaws, we watch Shark Week every summer, and we hear about the occasional shark attack on the news. The idea of a shark attack is easy to imagine and we therefore think it could happen to us.
The same is true of Coronavirus. With hundreds of stories being published on Coronavirus every day, we are naturally led to believe that the epidemic is bigger, closer, and more dangerous than it actually is.
How can we combat this type of flawed reasoning? One way is to take a more passive interest in the news rather than being glued to the TV or reading every new Coronavirus headline that is published. This will make Coronavirus less top-of-mind, and therefore less threatening. Another is to engage in the following exercise. Ask yourself if you know anyone, personally, who has contracted the illness. If the answer is no (which it likely is), ask yourself if you know anyone who knows anyone who has been infected. If the answer to both of these questions is no, then rest assured that the threat of Coronavirus is less imminent than top-of-mind thinking might lead you to believe.
#2: Intuition is mostly a blessing. In cases like these, it can be a curse.
Our ability to make snap judgments is one of the wonders of the human mind. It allows us to navigate our complicated social environments with relative ease — akin to an airplane flying on autopilot. However, when it comes to math, probabilities, and rational decision making, our intuition can lead us astray. Consider the following brain teaser, popularized by the Nobel Laureate psychologist, Daniel Kahneman:
A baseball bat and a ball cost $1.10 together. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?
Your answer? If you relied on intuition, you probably guessed 10 cents. Most people do. It takes a bit of deep thinking, however, to arrive at the correct answer, which is 5 cents.
Taking some time to do the math behind the Coronavirus might help to quell any hysteria you might be experiencing. And, it may be best to start with a simple calculation. There are about 7.5 billion people in the world. According to the New York Times, approximately 100,000 people have been infected as of yesterday. That means the current odds of anyone in the world contracting the virus is approximately 1 in 75,000. Combine that with the fact that few people who contract the virus actually become seriously ill and you can see how irrational the hysteria really is.
3#: Existential threats often receive more attention than they deserve.
Millions of years of evolution has endowed us with a cognitive architecture that is especially attuned to environmental threats. It’s how we were able to survive, and multiply, in dangerous environments such as the African Serengeti. While this phenomenon, known as the “negativity bias,” works wonders to keep us safe in threatening or unknown environments, it can also produce unnecessary worry. Be cognizant of the fact that your mind has this built-in survival mechanism. Be thankful for it, but give your rational mind the green light to turn it off when it is safe to do so.
Conclusion: Take a deep breath. Coronavirus is almost certainly not coming for you. And, even if it were, panic is not the answer. Wash your hands, continue enjoying your life, and leave the rest to chance. In this case, it’s on your side.
Mark Travers is a contributor for Forbes and Psychology Today, where he writes about psychology, human potential, and the science of success. Mark holds a B.A. in psychology, magna cum laude, from Cornell University and an M.A. and Ph.D. in social psychology from the University of Colorado Boulder. His academic research has been published in leading psychology journals and has been featured in the New York Times and The New Yorker, among other popular publications. Mark has worked in a variety of industries, including journalism, digital entrepreneurship, international education, and marketing research. Stay current with all of Mark’s articles, interviews, and insights by subscribing to his newsletter, the Weekly Top Three, here: tinyletter.com/markwtravers.
A stretcher is moved from an AMR ambulance to the Life Care Center of Kirkland where one associate and one resident were diagnosed with the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) according to a statement released by the facility in Kirkland, Washington on February 29, 2020. – The first fatality from the novel coronavirus has been confirmed on US soil, as President Donald Trump on Saturday urged Americans not to panic. (Photo by Jason Redmond / AFP) (Photo by JASON REDMOND/AFP via Getty Images)
Eleven people have now died in the United States after contracting the novel coronavirus. Ten of the U.S. deaths have been in Washington state and one has been in California, with the latest two fatalities confirmed on Wednesday.
At least 159 people have been diagnosed with the coronavirus—known as COVID-19—in the U.S. so far, according to a virus tracker from researchers at Johns Hopkins University. The infections are scattered across at least 16 U.S. states.
Pence said that all travel coming from Iran has been suspended and “even foreign nationals who visit either [China or Iran] are barred from coming into this country for 14 days.”
Pence also said that the Center for Medicaid and Medicare Services has issued new guidelines for nursing homes nationwide aiming to improve infectious disease control and ensure those operating these facilities are complying with federal standards. Many of the cases in Washington State have been linked with a nursing home.
At a press conference on Tuesday, Pence had said the U.S. is now “screening 100% of all travelers taking direct flights from all airports in Italy and South Korea” to the U.S and that Medicaid and Medicare would cover the cost for Americans who can’t afford COVID-19 testing. He added that new guidance would quickly be issued “to make it clear that, subject to a doctor’s orders, anyone can be tested.”
Federal officials noted that the American public should prepare for “more cases in the community” as the country improves its ability to track and diagnose the disease.
Outside Washington and New York, at least 14 other states have recorded confirmed COVID-19 cases. A number of these cases are Americans evacuated from the virus-stricken Diamond Princess cruise ship in Japan, where over 620 passengers and crew were diagnosed with the virus.
Globally, more than 94,000 cases of COVID-19 have been diagnosed or clinically confirmed as of March 4 and more than 3,200 people have died, according to Johns Hopkins University researchers. The vast majority of cases are in China, but diagnoses in the U.S. are expected to increase over the coming days and weeks, according to the CDC.
U.S. Citizens Document A Day In The Life On Lockdown In Wuhan
On early Wednesday morning, a U.S. plane evacuated around 240 Americans from Wuhan. Justin Steece and Priscilla Dickey were not on that plane with their families.
Here’s what to know about COVID-19 cases in the U.S.
California
California announced the state’s first COVID-19 death and State Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency on Wednesday.
Local and federal health officials are now working to contact other cruise passengers as they “may also have been exposed,” according to Placer County health officials. Newsom said about 2,500 passengers traveled on the same voyage as the Placer Country victim.
As of Wednesday, 53 people had tested positive for COVID-19 in California. Of these, 24 were cases related to repatriation flights and 29 cases were not related to these flights; 12 were travel-related. 10 more involved person-to-person spread, four involved community transmission and three were “currently under investigation.”
Officials in Washington State confirmed a tenth coronavirus death on Wednesday and the state currently has 39 COVID-19 cases.
Nine of the deaths are in King County, and an additional death is in Snohomish County. The most recently reported deaths in King County include a woman in her eighties who was never hospitalized and died at her family home, and a man in his 50s who was hospitalized at Harborview Medical Center. Both of them died on Feb. 26 and were residents of Life Care Center in Kirkland, a long-term residential facility where more than 50 people have reported symptoms of possible COVID-19 infection.
On Tuesday, Acting U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf said that he had ordered the facility to close “out of an abundance of caution” and “directed those employees to telework, if possible, in order to reduce the threat of community spread of the coronavirus.”
The center said in a statement Wednesday that there are several confirmed COVID-19 cases connected to the facility. It added that current residents and associates continue to be monitored closely” and that it is following the infection control recommendations from the CDC. The center had previously said all visits from family and volunteers are suspended for the time being, and new residents are currently not being admitted to the center.
King County announced an additional seven new COVID-19 cases on Tuesday. Thirty-one cases in the state, including those who died, are in King County. At least another nine are in Snohomish County, according to Washington State’s Department of Health. About 230 people at risk of having been exposed to the coronavirus are under medical supervision.
King County signed an emergency declaration on Sunday allowing it to take extra steps to respond to the COVID-19 outbreak. “Among the first actions: purchasing a motel and setting up modular housing units on publicly-owned parking lots and other available land,” the county said in a statement.
Health officials say the first patient who succumbed to the virus had no known history, travel or contact with a known COVID-19 case, suggesting he was infected by human-to-human transmission (often referred to as community transmission).
The results of a study published by Trevor Bedford, a computational biologist at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, suggests that the true number of infections in the state is “a few hundred.”
The study “strongly suggests that there has been cryptic transmission in Washington State for the past six weeks,” Bedford tweeted.
Washington Governor Jay Inslee declared a state of emergency on Saturday in response to the new cases, and directed state agencies to use “all resources necessary to prepare for and respond to the outbreak.”
The first case of COVID-19 in the U.S. appeared in Washington on Jan. 21. A 35-year-old man presented himself to an urgent care clinic in Snohomish County, Wash., after four days of cough and fever, according to the New England Journal of Medicine, which reported that he had recently been visiting family in Wuhan.
The man was released from a Washington hospital on Feb. 4, according to the Associated Press.
Cruise ship evacuees
On Feb. 17, the U.S. State Department evacuated more than 300 American citizens from a quarantined cruise ship in Japan. The Diamond Princess has the largest outbreak of the novel coronavirus outside China, with at least 621 confirmed cases so far.
During the evacuation process, American officials learned that 14 of the Americans being repatriated were infected with COVID-19, according to a joint statement from the U.S. State Department and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
After consulting with HHS, officials with the State Department decided to allow the 14 individuals, “who were in isolation, separated from other passengers, and continued to be asymptomatic, to remain on the aircraft to complete the evacuation process,” the statement said.
CDC spokesperson Richard Quartarone told TIME hospitalized patients are at facilities in Sacramento and San Antonio, Texas, or at the Nebraska Medical Center.
Evacuees who were not hospitalized were held in quarantine for 14 days after departing planes at Travis Air Force Base in Sacramento, Calif. and Joint Base San Antonio-Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas, officials said.
Most, if not all, of these evacuees have since been released from federal quarantine.
More than 100 American citizens who had been on the Diamond Princess remained in Japan, including in hospitals, the CDC said on Feb. 18. The CDC specified that these citizens will only be allowed to fly back to the U.S. if they test negative for and don’t show any symptoms of the virus during the 14-day period.
“If an individual from this cruise arrives in the United States before the 14-day period ends, they will still be subject to a mandatory quarantine until they have completed the 14-day period with no symptoms or positive coronavirus test results,” the CDC said.
The CDC also highlighted concerns with the quarantine process on board the ship, saying that it may have slowed the spread of the disease but that it “may not have been sufficient to prevent transmission among individuals on the ship.”
New York
On Thursday, New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo confirmed 11 additional cases of COVID-19, bringing the total in the state to 22. Of the new cases, eight are in Westchester, two are in New York City and one is in Nassau County. “We are trying to contain as much as possible the spread of each case we find – but we expect more cases,” Cuomo said.
Thursday’s cases in New York City include a man in his 40s and a woman in her 80s; neither had traveled to areas with known outbreaks or are connected to other individuals already diagnosed with the disease, according to New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio.
On Wednesday afternoon, Cuomo confirmed five new cases, all in a single family from New Rochelle: a wife and husband in their 40s and three of their children. The entire family is under self-quarantine, Cuomo said.
On Wednesday morning, Cuomo had confirmed an additional four cases of coronavirus. All four are tied to the state’s second case of COVID-19, announced Tuesday — a man in his 50s who lives in Westchester County and works in Manhattan. Those four cases included his wife, two of his children and a neighbor who drove him to the hospital, Cuomo said.
The female child attends SAR Academy and High School in the Bronx and the male child attends Yeshiva University in Manhattan and has not been on campus since Feb. 27, according de Blasio. The children and their mother remain isolated at their home in Westchester, de Blasio said.
Cuomo noted on Tuesday that the man in his fifties had not traveled to regions with increasing COVID-19 cases, but had recently been to Miami. However he noted “that is not a place we have known there is any cluster of coronavirus.”
On Sunday, Cuomo confirmed New York’s first case of the coronavirus. He said on Twitter that a woman in her late 30s contracted the virus while traveling in Iran. She has mild respiratory symptoms but is not in serious condition, and is currently isolated in her home.
Cuomo said there is “no reason for anxiety” as the “general risk remains low in New York.” Still, residents rushed to purchase masks and hand sanitizers at pharmacies, which saw long lines out the door, according to the New York Times. Many said they were out of stock.
Nebraska
Doctors in Nebraska have treated 13 COVID-19 patients — all of whom were on the Diamond Princess cruise ship in Japan, according to the New York Times.
Texas
Texas has 12 confirmed cases of COVID-19 as of Wednesday, according to the Texas Tribune.
Eleven involve evacuees who were infected overseas before arriving at the San Antonio Lackland Air Force Base for quarantine. The only case identified outside of the site is a man in his 70s who lives in the Houston area. He recently returned from travel abroad and is currently isolated in the hospital, according to Texas Health and Human Services.
The City of San Antonio Metropolitan Health District and the CDC announced Feb. 13 that the first person testing positive for COVID-19 in Texas was one of the Americans evacuated from Wuhan and transported to the military base on Feb. 7, after leaving Wuhan the previous day.
On the morning of Feb. 11, the patient exhibited signs of a fever, Jennifer McQuiston, a CDC division deputy director, said. The person was transported to a hospital that morning, where samples were gathered and sent to the CDC overnight. Officials received the positive diagnosis the following day.
“[That patient is] receiving excellent medical care,” McQuiston said at a Feb. 13 press conference. “They were, of course, not happy to learn of their diagnosis last night, and they do have loved ones in the United States that they are in contact with by phone, and we wish this individual well.”
Dr. Anita Kurian, assistant director at the San Antonio Metropolitan Health District, also said at the press conference that “the risk for us at this time to the community here is still considered low.”
Illinois
Illinois officials said it has four “presumed positive” cases on Tuesday. The third and fourth cases are a married man and woman in their seventies.
The first case in Illinois was a woman in her 60s who had returned to the U.S. from Wuhan on Jan. 13, health officials said at a press briefing on Jan. 30. Her husband then contracted the virus, becoming the first confirmed case of person-to-person transfer of the virus in the U.S.
The Illinois Department of Public Health announced Feb. 12 that it became the first state in the U.S. to begin in-state testing for the virus.
Oregon
Oregon has confirmed three “presumptive positive” cases of COVID-19 in the state. One of those cases was confirmed by the CDC on Wednesday.
State officials confirmed a third case on Tuesday: an adult Umatilla County resident who is hospitalized in Walla Walla, Wash. Initial reports suggest that the resident recently went to a youth basketball game at a middle school. Athena-Weston School District officials closed the gym in question and would “conduct a deep cleaning out of an abundance of caution,” health officials said in a statement.
The state’s first and second COVID-19 cases are adults in Washington County who live together. Neither person has “ a history of travel to a country where the virus was circulating, nor is believed to have had a close contact with another confirmed case,” health officials said in a statement. “As such, public health officials are considering it a likely community-transmitted case, meaning that the origin of the infection is unknown.”
Florida
The CDC confirmed two cases of COVID-19 in Florida, the Florida Department of Health said on Monday. Officials said on Tuesday that a third person in the state had tested positive; she is the sister of a person already confirmed to have the virus.
The agency had said in a previous statement on Sunday that the first patient is an adult resident of Manatee County who has not traveled to countries identified for restricted travel by the CDC; the second patient is an adult Hillsborough County resident who had traveled to Italy. Both individuals would continue to “remain isolated until cleared by public health officials,” the Florida Department of Health said.
Georgia
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp confirmed the state’s first two cases of COVID-19 on Monday evening.
Both individuals are residents of Fulton County who live in the same household; one recently returned from Italy and both are isolated at home with mild symptoms, according to a statement from the governor’s office.
“We knew that Georgia would likely have confirmed cases of COVID-19, and we planned for it. The immediate risk of COVID-19 to the general public, however, remains low at this time,” said Dr. Kathleen E. Toomey, Commissioner of the Georgia Department of Public Health.
Rhode Island
Rhode Island announced its first COVID-19 “presumptive positive” case on Sunday: a person in their 40s who had traveled to Italy in mid-February.
Dr. Nicole Alexander-Scott, Director of the Rhode Island Department of Health, said in a statement that the agency has been “preparing for weeks” and “fully anticipated having a first case of COVID-19.”
“We are not seeing widespread community transmission in Rhode Island, and the general level of risk for Rhode Islanders is still low,” Alexander-Scott said.
The agency announced a second COVID-19 “presumptive positive case” later the same day: a teenager who is “at home with mild symptoms.” She had been on the “same trip to Europe in mid-February as the male in his 40s,” according to the Rhode Island Department of Health.
“All 38 of the people who went on this trip will be self-monitoring for symptoms at home for 14 days with public health supervision, the department said in a statement. “They have been instructed to not go to school or work and to remain at home for these 14 days.”
Arizona
Arizona confirmed on Tuesday its second “presumed positive” case of COVID-19, in a man in his twenties.
“This individual is a known contact of a presumed positive case outside of Arizona who had traveled to an area with community spread of COVID-19,” the Arizona Department of Health Services news release.
The first case of COVID-19 was confirmed in Arizona by the CDC on Jan. 26. The person had also recently returned to the U.S. after visiting Wuhan. The Arizona Department of Health Services said in a public statement that the person is “a member of the Arizona State University community who does not live in university housing,” and added that they were not severely ill but would be kept in isolation.
The infected man was subsequently released from isolation 26 days after testing positive for COVID-19, according to the Associated Press.
New Hampshire
The state’s first case was announced Monday in a hospital employee who had recently traveled to Italy. Health officials later learned this person broke quarantine to attend a social event on Feb. 28 and said they would contact attendees who “had close contact with the person.”
New Hampshire announced its second “presumed positive” case of COVID-19 on Tuesday. State officials said the person, an adult male from Grafton County, had close contact with the first case and is currently isolated at home.
At this time, there is no evidence of more widespread community transmission in New Hampshire,” said state Epidemiologist Dr. Benjamin Chan in a statement after the first case was announced.
New Jersey
On Wednesday, New Jersey announced its first “presumptive positive case” of COVID-19 — a man in his 30s who has been hospitalized in Bergen County.
Health officials maintained that “most New Jersey residents” are still at low-risk.
Massachusetts
On Monday, state health officials announced a presumptive case: a woman who had recently traveled to Italy.
On Feb. 1, the CDC announced that a man in his 20s who lives in Boston was diagnosed with COVID-19; he had recently traveled to Wuhan.
The Massachusetts Department of Public Health said the man sought medical care soon after his return to Boston. He has since been in isolation, and those who came in contact with him have been identified and are being monitored for symptoms, the agency said in a public statement.
“We are grateful that this young man is recovering and sought medical attention immediately,” said Monica Bharel, Massachusetts Public Health Commissioner, in the statement. “Massachusetts has been preparing for a possible case of this new coronavirus, and we were fortunate that astute clinicians took appropriate action quickly. Again, the risk to the public from the 2019 novel coronavirus remains low in Massachusetts.”
Wisconsin
The Wisconsin Department of Health Services and the CDC announced the first case of COVID-19 in the state on Feb. 5. The person was only identified as “an adult with a history of travel to Beijing, China prior to becoming ill and was exposed to known cases while in China.”
Wisconsin health officials said in a public statement that the person is isolated at home, and is doing well.
North Carolina
North Carolina announced its first “presumed positive” case of COVID-19 on Tuesday. According to state officials, the person traveled to Washington state and was exposed at a long-term care facility where there is currently a COVID-19 outbreak.
