Coronavirus: US public health agency orders mandatory quarantine for Wuhan evacuees
- ‘We are preparing as if this were the next pandemic, but we are hopeful still that this is not and will not be the case,’ says CDC official
- Passengers will be held at an airbase in southern California for 14 days from the time they left China
The US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has ordered a mandatory quarantine of 195 American passengers who have returned from the Chinese city of Wuhan, the epicentre of the coronavirus epidemic, the first such action in half a century.
The move comes amid growing global concern over how rapidly the disease is spreading and questions about how it is transmitted.
“While we realise this is an unprecedented action, we are facing an unprecedented public health threat,” Nancy Messonnier, director of CDC’s National Centre for Immunisation and Respiratory Diseases, said at a briefing on Friday.
“We are preparing as if this were the next pandemic, but we are hopeful still that this is not and will not be the case,” she said.
CDC officials said the passengers would be held at the March Air Reserve Base in southern California for 14 days from the time they left Wuhan, in Hubei province. Most of the passengers on this flight were diplomats and family members being repatriated.