SAN DIEGO COUNTY, Calif. — A father and daughter were released from Rady Children's Hospital Friday after testing negative for the deadly coronavirus and were taken back to MCAS Miramar where they will continue to be in quarantine, according to CDC officials.
Passengers from the flight that arrived Wednesday and the one that arrived Thursday will be quarantined for two weeks as federally mandated, according to MCAS Miramar.
The father and daughter were part of the first wave of evacuees from Wuhan, China that arrived at MCAS Miramar on Wednesday.
Two other people were hospitalized Wednesday afternoon, hours after their plane carrying 167 Americans landed at in San Diego. All of the passengers underwent medical screening upon landing.
In the days after the plane arrived, three additional evacuees developed a fever or a cough that warrants further evaluation and were taken to San Diego hospitals.
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Currently, based on the information released by MCAS Miramar officials, there are five evacuees that remain at San Diego hospitals from the flight that arrived on Wednesday.
In total, seven evacuees, including the father and daughter released on Friday, from that flight have been and continue to be evaluated.
The hospitals and county health officials were pressing the CDC to offer test kits to identify the strain of virus without the need to send biological samples to the federal headquarters in Atlanta.
The 167 people who arrived from China on Wednesday are under a government-mandated two-week quarantine due to possible exposure to the potentially deadly disease. Medical personnel with the CDC met the arriving flight at the northern San Diego military base after it touched down shortly before 9:30 a.m. Wednesday, officials said.
Doctors said they were awaiting test results from the CDC to determine if any of two other patients are infected with coronavirus. Those results are expected as early as Saturday morning.
Dr. John Bradley, medical director of infectious diseases at Rady, said there was no threat to the public at large or to other patients in either facility.
Nearly 200 Americans arrived at March Air Reserve Base in Riverside on Jan. 29 and are quarantined there after being evacuated from Wuhan.
A second plane carrying 65 evacuees from Wuhan landed at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar Friday morning after a brief stopover in Vancouver, British Columbia. The patients were screened by CDC personnel and did not appear to show any symptoms, so were allowed to join on-base facilities for the duration of their quarantine.
The number of confirmed cases of the new virus has risen again in China while fatalities increased to 722, as the ruling Communist Party faces anger and recriminations from the public over the death of a doctor who was threatened by police after trying to sound the alarm about the disease over a month ago.
The U.S. Embassy in Beijing says a 60-year-old U.S. citizen diagnosed with the virus died in Wuhan, apparently the first American fatality of the outbreak.
China's government says another 3,399 people had been diagnosed over the last 24 hours, reversing two days of declines, and raising the total number of cases to 34,546. Three more cruise ship passengers were diagnosed with the virus in Japan for a total of 64.