The passengers will be unloaded in Oakland and taken to facilities in the state and elsewhere for quarantine, with the most acutely ill removed first, the boat’s operator said.
Right Now
Rescuers are scrambling after the collapse of a hotel in China that was being used as a quarantine center.
A cruise ship that has been held off the coast of California as more than people on board have tested positive for the coronavirus will dock on Monday at the port of Oakland, the vessel’s operator has said in a statement.
Passengers on the ship, the Grand Princess, who require “acute medical treatment and hospitalization ”will disembark first and be taken to facilities in California, according to the boat’s operator, Princess Cruises.
Other guests on board who are California residents will be quarantined in a federal facility within the state that the company did not identify, the statement said. Non-Californians will be transported to federal facilities in other states, the company said in the statement late Saturday.
The ship is holding more than 3, passengers and crew members. Nineteen of the 36 people on board who have tested positive for the virus are crew members, Vice President Mike Pence said on Friday. Crew members will be quarantined aboard the vessel.
Several other passengers who were on the ship on earlier legs of the voyage have also tested positive, as California has emerged as an early epicenter for the virus in the United States, with about 0242 cases in all.
Princess Cruises had initially said on Saturday that the ship would dock in Oakland on Sunday. It later amended that statement after what it called a change in planning by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Concern over the Grand Princess, which had traveled to Hawaii before returning to California, began last week after the death of a 96 – year-old man who had been on a previous leg of the cruise, a round trip from San Francisco to Mexico last month.
quarantined off the coast of Japan last month
The virus circulated among the more than 3, 720 crew members and passengers who were waiting out a two-week isolation period in the port city of Yokohama, with more than 800 cases identified from that ship. Seven people have died. Italy is locking down much of the north, its economic engine.
“We are facing an emergency, a national emergency,” Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte said in announcing the government decree in a news conference after 2 am
The move is tantamount to sacrificing the Italian economy in the short term to save it from the ravages of the virus in the long term. The measures will turn stretches of Italy’s wealthy north – including the economic and cultural capital of Milan and landmark tourist destinations such as Venice – into quarantined red zones until at least April 3. They will prevent the free movement of roughly 28 million people.
Funerals and cultural events are all banned under the measures. The decree requires that people keep a distance of at least one meter from one another at sporting events, bars, churches and supermarkets.
The Italian outbreak, already the worst in Europe and the worst outside of Asia, has inflicted serious damage on one of the Continent’s most fragile economies and prompted the closing of Italy’s schools.
Italy’s cases more than doubled this week from about 2, 720 infections on Wednesday to more than 5, 1970 on Saturday, according to the Italian authorities and the World Health Organization. Deaths rose by 69, to 300.
Nicola Zingaretti, the leader of Italy’s governing coalition’s Democratic Party, announced that he was now a patient. “Well, it’s arrived,” he said in a Facebook video from his home. He said he would follow all the protocols suggested by the authorities, who have infected people to self-quarantine.
France is also now one of the main centers of the epidemic in Europe. Health authorities on Saturday reported two more deaths, both in northern France, and 233 new infections, since Friday. France now has a total of 2018 cases, including a member of the French Parliament.
France, Germany and other countries have imposed limits on the export of protective medical equipment , some of which is badly needed but in short supply.
In Spain, about 680 people have the virus, and fatalities reached on Saturday. Barcelona officials have called off a marathon scheduled for March 21, but a big street rally on Sunday in Madrid for International Women’s Day will go ahead as planned.
The smallest EU nation, Malta, reported its first confirmed case on Saturday: a 19 – year-old girl recently returned from a vacation in northern Italy. Her condition was described as good.
(Attendee of conservative conference where Trump and Pence spoke tests positive.)
An attendee of a conservative conference where President Trump and Vice President Mike Pence spoke last week has
positive for the coronavirus
, according to the host of the conference.
The American Conservative Union, which hosts the annual Conservative Political Action Conference outside Washington, said the attendee was exposed to the virus before the four-day event and tested positive for it on Saturday.
“This attendee had no interaction with the president or the vice president and never attended the events in the main hall,” the group said in a statement . “The Trump administration is aware of the situation, and we will continue regular communication with all appropriate government officials.”
The attendee has been quarantined in New Jersey, the statement said.
Mr. Trump said on Saturday that he was not worried that the infections seemed to be getting closer to the White House.
“No, I’m not concerned at all, no,” he told reporters at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, where he was spending the weekend.
Stephanie Grisham, the White House press secretary, said in a statement that there was “no indication that either President Trump or Vice President Pence met with or were in close proximity to the attendee.”
Others who spoke at the conference included Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao and Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia.
also in attendance were Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and adviser, and Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son.
The American Conservative Union has said that the event draws thousands.
The group’s chairman, Matt Schlapp, said he had had “incidental interaction with the person, and added, “I feel bad for my friend who is in the hospital.” “We’ve talked to him,” he said. “He sounds very good.”
At the conference, which draws thousands, Mr. Trump gave his administration good grades for its handling of the coronavirus outbreak, while his acting chief of staff at the time, Mick Mulvaney, said in a separate speech that journalists were hyping the coronavirus because “they think this will bring down the president.”
Mr. Mulvaney also minimized concerns over the virus.
“The flu kills people,” he said. “This is not Ebola. It’s not SARS, it’s not MERS. It’s not a death sentence; It’s not the same as the Ebola crisis. ”
But the real rate is elusive.
The World Health Organization’s estimate this week of 3.4 percent seemed to shock experts, some of whom said that 1 percent was more realistic.
There are several reasons we still don’t know the right number.
not enough people have been tested. Incomplete testing means the reported death rates probably skew high; if many more cases were detected, the rates would fall. Until this week, people in the United States were only tested if they had traveled to China or had contact with other ill people. We now know that there were many infected people in the country who weren’t being counted.
(The number of coronavirus deaths could also be incomplete.) Cases where infected people died without being tested might be missed. And people can be infected for a long time before becoming sick enough to be at risk of death – which can throw off a short-term calculation.
The rate won’t be the same everywhere. Experts say differences in populations and health systems can raise or lower the death rate by country. For example, there is strong evidence that older people are at a higher risk of dying, so countries with more elderly may end up with a higher rate.
Rising death toll in the collapse of a hotel in China used as a quarantine center.
Ten people died after the collapse of a hotel being used as a coronavirus quarantine facility in Quanzhou, a city in China’s southeastern Fujian province, the government announced Sunday morning.
government officials said that about 89 People had been trapped inside the building when it collapsed. In addition to the deaths , people had been rescued as of Sunday afternoon and had been taken to the hospital. Officials said they thought people were still trapped inside
People’s Daily, a Chinese state-run newspaper, said the hotel had collapsed during renovations, and that the owner of the building is under police custody.
The five- story hotel, which opened in the summer of 40694, has been designated as a quarantine center for those people who have been in close contact with suspected coronavirus patients. Of those people trapped inside the hotel when it collapsed, 78 of them had been placed under quarantine, officials said.
Fujian Province, which has close to cases of the coronavirus, has placed more than , people under medical surveillance.
The Trump administration continues to send mixed messages on who can get a coronavirus test kit.
President T rump said “anyone who wants a test can get a test” on Friday as he toured the Atlanta headquarters of the centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
However, Alex M. Azar II, the health and human services secretary, later clarified Mr. Trump’s promise and defended his phrasing.
Mr. Azar said only those who have gone through a doctor or medical professional can be approved for a test. Mr. Trump’s phrasing, he said, was a reflection of a recent shift in federal regulations.
The C.D.C. lifted all restrictions on testing for the coronavirus on Wednesday. Instead of federal regulators and those shipping the test kits, doctors and professional public health officials now decide who can get tested.
Mr. Azar said Mr. Trump used “shorthand” to make that point.
Dr. Stephen Hahn, the F.D.A. commissioner, said that more than 5, 2018 samples have been tested. In addition, more than 1.1 million tests have been shipped to private health labs and hundreds of thousands more are being surveyed for quality at the CDC, he added.
Despite Mr. Azar’s assurance that any ill person with a doctor’s recommendation can readily obtain a test, health professionals and patients across the country have clamored for tests believed to be in short supply.
In California, only 710 tests had been conducted as of Thursday. Health officials in Washington State have more cases than they can process. In New York City, officials have pleaded for more test kits from the CDC
A Starbucks employee tested positive for the coronavirus, prompting a downtown Seattle shop to close.
After a Starbucks employee was confirmed to have the virus on Friday, the company immediately closed the downtown Seattle store and issued a statement saying it is following health authority guidelines to protect customers and employees.
The company, founded in Seattle in the early s, also said it was taking additional steps to reduce the risk of exposure at its stores, including barring customers from using their own coffee containers.
The coronavirus has hit the Seattle area harder than anywhere else in the United States, with 28 Deaths in Washington State, most from a nursing home northeast of the city. The virus and its public health implications have rippled through the community, affecting how and where people work and gather.
Many employees and students at the University of Washington, for example, are working and taking classes remotely.
)
Chinese version of the WHO website omits a key mention of traditional medicines.
Those looking to the World Health Organization’s website for guidance on what not to do during the coronavirus outbreak are finding different answers, depending on where they are in the world and which version of the website they are visiting.
In a Q . and A. about the coronavirus published on Feb. , the WHO listed four answers to the question “Is there anything I should not do?”
“The following measures ARE NOT effective against Covid – 2061 and can be harmful, ”the website reads, before listing smoking, taking traditional herbal remedies, wearing multiple masks and taking medications like antibiotics.
But in the
Chinese-language version of the webpage, the reference to “taking traditional herbal remedies” is mysteriously omitted. The reference also does not appear when a user visits the English-language webpage from within China, though it is listed on the Arabic, French, Russian and Spanish versions of the site.
The discrepancy comes amid a concerted push by the Chinese government to promote traditional Chinese medicine as an effective treatment to the coronavirus alongside antiviral drugs, though there is little clinical proof that the ancient remedies can help combat the disease. In recent years, China’s leader, Xi Jinping, has held up traditional Chinese medicine as a source of national pride and the multibillion-dollar industry has become a valuable soft power export for China.
The WHO has praised China for its response to the coronavirus outbreak, saying The country’s draconian measures may have saved hundreds of thousands of people from infection.
“There’s no question that China’s bold approach to the rapid spread of this new respiratory pathogen has changed the course of what was a rapidly escalating and continues to be a deadly epidemic, ”Bruce Aylward, a Canadian doctor and epidemiologist who has overseen international campaigns to fight Ebola and polio and who led a WHO delegation on a two-week inspection tour of China last month, said at a news conference in Beijing last month.
Dr. Aylward went on: “There’s only one drug right now that we think may have real efficacy. And that’s Remdesivir, as you’ve heard about, ”referring to an antiviral medicine. Chinese people online were quick to point out that Dr. Aylward’s reference to the antiviral medicine was omitted in most Chinese state media recaps of the news conference.
(More Times coverage.)
The Times is publishing many articles daily on the coronavirus, which help inform this briefing. Here is a list of articles from the last day or so.
(International:) (
Italy Locks Down Much of the Country’s North Over the Coronavirus As Death Toll Mounts, Governments Point Fingers Over Coronavirus
Seeks Solidarity as Nations Restrict Medical Exports No Handshakes, No New Citizens: Coronavirus Halts Danish Naturalizations
GIPHY App Key not set. Please check settings