14:35

My colleague Mario Koran in Oakland reports that four of the 167 passengers aboard a quarantine flight from Wuhan to a Marine Corps air station near San Diego were sent to local hospitals shortly after their plane touched down yesterday morning.



The San Diego Union-Tribune said that none of the American citizens returning to the US showed any symptoms when they boarded the flight, but medical screenings done after their arrival revealed that four people (three adults and one child) showed symptoms that may have been caused by the coronavirus that has caused 25,000 people worldwide to fall ill and killed nearly 500 in China.

So far there have been no confirmed cases of coronavirus infection among the passengers; the most recent tally of confirmed cases includes six in California and 11 nationwide.



The San Diego air station is one of three military bases in California being used as a quarantine site. Three additional bases outside California are also designated quarantine locations.



While the common flu remains a more significant threat to public health in the United States, the novel nature of the coronavirus has fuelled global attention, writes the Union-Tribune.



Earlier this week, the Guardian reported that experts are warning the travel restrictions issued by the Trump administration and quarantine of roughly 200 people in California — the first mass quarantine in the US in more than 50 years — may backfire.



A quarantine can be counterproductive if it appears to be overly strict and broad and diminishes the public’s trust in authorities, one expert told Sam Levin, adding that the government should use the “least restrictive” options available and not “limit people’s rights and liberty to a greater extent than is necessary”.



“We should do the utmost to protect public health. But we have to make sure the measures we’re implementing aren’t worse than the virus itself,” Jennifer Nuzzo, the senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told Levin.

