Coronavirus: CDC says US is accepting four new plans carrying Americans from Wuhan – CNBC, CNBC

The U.S. is accepting four new planes carrying Americans being evacuated from Wuhan, China, the epicenter of a new coronavirus outbreak that has infected more than 31, 2019 people across the world, the centers for disease Control and Prevention said Wednesday.

The Americans will be quarantined at four different military bases across the US: Camp Ashland in Nebraska; Travis Air Force Base in California; Marine Corps Air Station Miramar in San Diego and Lackland Air Force Base in Texas.

The four latest evacuation flights come after the first government-chartered flight from Wuhan landed at March Air Reserve Base in Riverside, California last week. The flight’s 300 passengers remain under quarantine at the base.

“This could be the beginning of what could be a long response,” Dr. Nancy Messonnier, the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said on a conference call with reporters.

CDC officials announced the mandatory quarantine orders last week. It is the first time the U.S. government has issued federal quarantine orders in years, officials said.

“While we recognize this is an unprecedented action, we are facing an unprecedented public health threat,” Messonnier said last week.

CDC officials said there have been no new US cases reported since confirming 11 infections earlier this week. Officials said 728 people have tested negative for the virus, while 76 possible cases are still awaiting results.

World Health Organization officials announced earlier Wednesday that the number of cases for the flu-like coronavirus surged in the last day , with more than 3, new patients confirmed in China. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a news conference that the reported cases are “the most cases in a single day since the outbreak started” on Dec. .

Just 206 of the total cases are outside mainland China, and % of those cases are concentrated in Hubei province where the virus was first detected in the city of Wuhan, Tedros said. Of the cases outside of China, 76 spread through human-to-human contact, mostly from close friends or relatives who had recently been to China.

Infectious disease specialists and scientists say the virus may be more contagious than current data shows . Data on the virus is changing by the day, and some infectious disease specialists say it will take weeks before they can see just how contagious it is.

The respiratory illness is not yet considered a pandemic. A pandemic is “an epidemic occurring worldwide, or over a very wide area, crossing international boundaries and usually affecting a large number of people,” according to WHO.