Plane carrying over 200 Americans from coronavirus outbreak zone lands in California
A plane of American evacuees from the Chinese city at the center of the coronavirus outbreak touched down in the US Wednesday — but they will not be allowed to return home until after a quarantine period, officials said.
Some 200 passengers from Wuhan all passed health screenings for the deadly virus when the chartered plane arrived in Anchorage to refuel en route to California, according to Alaska’s Department of Health and Social Services.
The group was examined again and cleared when it landed Wednesday morning at March Air Reserve Base in Riverside, California, and will now be locked down for up to 36 hours, news station KABC reported.
“Health officials in California are working diligently with the CDC and other partners,” Alaskan health officials said, adding that they will be “temporarily housed for a period of time.”
US officials chartered the plane to fly out diplomats and their families from Wuhan, as well as an “extremely limited” number of private citizens, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Dr. William Schaffner, a longtime adviser of the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention, said that it’s “certainly unusual” to quarantine an entire plane of healthy individuals, CNN reported.
“With SARS and Zika, we quarantined individuals, but not a whole airplane,” Schaffner told the outlet.
But experts are still working to fully understand the new coronavirus that has now killed more than 100 people in China.
“There’s much that is unknown about this virus, and so they’re being cautious,” Schaffner said. “I think this is consistent with good public health policy.”
With Post wires