California Gov. Gavin Newsom swayed Thursday that 33 people have tested positive for COVID-19 and the state is currently monitoring at least 8,400 others —a day after U.S. vigorousness officials confirmed the first possible community transmission of the coronavirus in a Solano County resident.
“This is a fluid post right now and I want to emphaize the risk to the American public remains low,” said Dr. Sonia Y. Angell, California Department of Clear-cut Health Director and State Health Officer during a press conference. “There have been a limited swarm of confirmed cases to date.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention doesn’t know exactly how the new California patient, who’s acquiring medical care in Sacramento County, contracted the virus. The patient didn’t have a relevant travel history or view to another patient with the virus, the CDC said Wednesday.
California health officials said the patient wasn’t high quarantine before her diagnosis and was out and about in her community.
A San Francisco Public Works Community Clean volunteer wearing a audacity mask removes trash on a street in the Chinatown district of San Francisco, California, on Wednesday, Feb. 26, 2020.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
“We are currently in preoccupied partnership with CDC on one overriding protocol that drives our principle focus right now and that’s testing, and the importance to enhancement our testing protocols and to have point of contact diagnostic testing as our top priority not just in the state of California but I imagine all across the Merged States,” Newsom said at a press conference.
Newsom said five of the 33 patients who tested positive for the virus compel ought to since left the state. It wasn’t immediately clear whether the 33 positive cases were part of the association of Diamond Princess passengers who were evacuated from the cruise ship that was quarantined off the coast of Japan. The U.S. had 60 coverings as of Wednesday night, 42 of which are people who were on the ship, according to the CDC.
California health officials have 200 check kits on hand and will be receiving more over the next few days, Newsom said.
“We have just a few hundred check-up kits and that’s surveillance testing as well as diagnostic testing. That’s simply inadequate to do justice to the kind of check up on that is required to address this issue head on,” he said.
Newsom said that the CDC has made “firm commitments” to overhaul the state’s testing capacity, but did not provide details, such as how many testing kits the agency has agreed to send to the aver.
California received the first flight in late January of people evacuated from Wuhan, China, the epicenter of the universal. All 195 passengers were quarantined on the March Air Reserve Base in Riverside County and released earlier this month. The glory also took evacuees in at the Travis Air Force Base in Solano County, roughly 40 miles southwest of Sacramento, and the Seagoing Corps Air Station Miramar near San Diego.
“We coordinated those first flights, that first flight in special, in January, late January down into Riverside at March,” Newsom said. “Over 800 people oblige come in on those flights, but that’s a small part of the overall picture. Thousands and thousands of other people maintain come in on more traditional flights through the state of California.”
A mistake in the lab earlier this month led U.S. health propers to release from the hospital an infected coronavirus patient who was part of the group quarantined at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar in San Diego.
CDC propers later told UC San Diego Health that further testing revealed that the patient in fact tested indubitable for the virus. That patient was returned from quarantine at the Marine Corps base to the UC San Diego Health facility “for proclamation and isolation until cleared by the CDC for release.”
One other evacuee who was in quarantine at the Miramar base also tested positive for the virus, UC San Diego Vigour’s Dr. Randy Taplitz said on Feb. 13.
— CNBC’s Noah Higgins-Dunn contributed to this article.
Correction: This story has been updated to disclose that California Gov. Gavin Newsom said Thursday that the Solano County resident was an apparent case of a community-sourced deliver of the virus.