Just ahead of peak travel season from China to the U.S., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has dispatched officials to airports with incoming or connecting flights from Wuhan, the center of a growing outbreak of a never-before-seen respiratory virus.
The first of those flights is scheduled to arrive at New York’s JFK airport late Friday night. The only other airport in the U.S. with direct flights from Wuhan is San Francisco International Airport, with a flight scheduled to arrive Saturday morning.
Officials will also look for ill passengers from connecting flights from Wuhan at Los Angeles’s LAX airport.
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An estimated 5,000 people could travel from Wuhan to the U.S. in the coming weeks, the CDC said, around the Chinese Lunar New Year.
CDC officials said they believe the current risk of the virus spreading in this country is low. However, “we’re concerned any time there is a new virus or new pathogen emerging in a population that hasn’t seen it before,” Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of Center for National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at CDC, said Friday during a call with reporters.
“What it means is that populations don’t have existing immunity, and we don’t have specific treatments or vaccines,” she said.
The newly discovered illness is a coronavirus called 2019 nCoV. As of Friday afternoon, at least 45 cases had been reported in China. Most of the cases are linked to a large market in Wuhan with live animals, but there is some evidence the virus can spread from person to person. Two deaths have been reported.
Three cases have been identified outside of China: one in Japan and two in Thailand.
Incoming passengers from Wuhan will be screened for respiratory symptoms and fever. Anyone suspected of having the new virus will be triaged and quarantined until testing can be done, which may take a day.
Coronaviruses can cause a range of symptoms including a runny nose, cough, sore throat and fever. Some are mild, while others are more likely to lead to pneumonia.
There’s no indication this particular virus is as dangerous as SARS, another coronavirus that was first detected in China. The 2003 SARS outbreak stretched into more than two dozen countries, sickening 8,098 people. Nearly 800 died.
Since then, there have been no new cases of SARS reported anywhere in the world. Another coronavirus, MERS, is particularly deadly. It was first reported in Saudi Arabia in 2012, and causes severe respiratory illness, including fever, cough and shortness of breath, according to the CDC.
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