44 Americans on cruise ship docked in Japan tested positive for coronavirus, U.S. health official sa
Source: WaPo
By Gerry Shih and Katie Mettler
Feb. 16, 2020 at 12:42 p.m. EST
Revelations that an octogenarian American on a cruise ship has contracted the coronavirus after passengers disembarked has raised fears that other potential carriers of the virus are at large. In China, meanwhile, the rate of growth for new cases appears to be slowing.
● Taiwan has reported its first fatality linked to the coronavirus, a man in his 60s. There are 20 confirmed cases on the self-ruled island.
● Several governments are scrambling after an 83-year-old American woman onboard the Westerdam cruise liner docked in Cambodia tested positive twice for the coronavirus infection after traveling to Malaysia.
● Forty four Americans who were traveling on the Diamond Princess cruise ship in Japan have been infected, Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told The Washington Post on Sunday.
● China reported 2,009 new coronavirus cases on Saturday, a drop from the previous two days, as the worldwide death toll rose to 1,669, with roughly 69,000 cases worldwide.
● Even more strict containment measures have been implemented across China’s quarantined Hubei province with a ban on all nonessential driving or trips outside homes.
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/coronavirus-china-updates/2020/02/16/616e9a74-4f6d-11ea-bf44-f5043eb3918a_story.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
“We anticipated glitches, but I have to tell you I didn’t anticipate one of this magnitude,” said Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease specialist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, adding that the best approach to containing a broader spread of the virus from the Westerdam would be to track down all of the passengers and quarantine them for two weeks.
“This could be a turning point” in the epidemic, Dr. Schaffner said. “We have potentially many people in many countries, and all it would require is just the establishment of another outbreak in another country and that could potentially tip the scales.”
Dr. Eyal Leshem, director of the Center for Travel Medicine and Tropical Diseases at the Sheba Medical Center in Israel, called the disclosures “extremely concerning” and said the passengers who traveled onward from Kuala Lumpur substantially increased the risk of a pandemic.
“We may end up with three or four countries with sustained transmission of the virus,” he said. “It may be more and more difficult to make sure this outbreak is contained only within China.”
