With New York City feeling the brunt of the coronavirus spread, many New Yorkers are fleeing the city for other locations.

Deborah Birx and Anthony S. Fauci, public health experts on the White House coronavirus task force, stressed that those who leave the city should self-quarantine at their new location for 14 days to ensure that they don’t have the disease.

“To everyone who has left New York over the last few days, because of the rate of the number of cases, you may have been exposed before you left New York,” Birx said. “Everybody who was in New York should be self-quarantined, meaning for the next 14 days, to ensure that the virus doesn’t spread to others, no matter where they have gone, whether it’s Florida, North Carolina or out to the far, far reaches of Long Island.”

Fauci reiterated that guidance, calling it a “very serious situation.”

“They’ve suffered terribly through no fault of their own. But what we’re seeing now is that, understandably people want to get out of New York. … The idea, if you look at the statistics, it’s disturbing. About one per thousand of these individuals are infected. That’s about eight to 10 times more than in other areas, which means when they go to another place for their own safety, they’ve got to be careful.”

More than half of all coronavirus cases in the United States are from the New York metro area, Birx said. And 31 percent of U.S. deaths from covid-19 have occurred in the area, she said.