The number of suspected coronavirus cases linked to Wednesday’s quarantine flight from Wuhan City, China, jumped to five Thursday afternoon.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a statement that UC San Diego Health received a third quarantined patient from Marine Corps Air Station Miramar Thursday afternoon.

The additional transfer, who had a fever and a cough, is the fifth such patient to arrive at a local hospital since the quarantine flight delivered 167 returning American citizens and their families to the military base Wednesday morning.

Two additional patients went to the university hospital Wednesday night while a father and his daughter were taken to Rady Children’s Hospital the same evening.


Miramar confirmed Thursday night that another repatriation flight was en route from China and expected to land at the air station this morning. Passengers aboard that flight will be required to remain quarantined for 14 days.

Tom Skinner, a spokesperson for the CDC who is part of the team on the ground at the local air base, said that samples from the five patients currently hospitalized have been or will be sent to the agency’s labs in Atlanta for testing, but as was the case last week, results will not be immediate.

“I would hope that we would have some test results back for them sometime over the weekend,” Skinner said late Thursday morning.

Though the five evacuees have shown some possible symptoms of novel coronavirus infection, CDC and local officials stressed Thursday that it’s very possible the virus is not present. Though the CDC has now confirmed a dozen cases in the U.S., 94 percent of the 206 tests performed as of Wednesday have been negative, according to a tabulation that the agency has posted online.


The news that local hospitals have now received suspected cases out of the quarantine area at Miramar on the same day that the first flight delivered 167 people from Wuhan, China, had a direct effect Thursday morning. Officials said patients, and especially parents, have become worried that they might somehow get infected merely by being treated at the same facility where a suspected case is being treated.

At a news conference near UC San Diego Medical Center, physicians worked to calm those fears.

Dr. John Bradley, director of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Rady, said a woman whose child had to be admitted with a bone infection was as worried about corona as she was about her child’s known medical condition, which itself required treatment in isolation to prevent spread to other patients. No one should be worried, Bradley said. The hospital knows how to keep bugs from spreading.

“The father and the kid are in an isolation room. We’re not worried at all that this is going to get out, and that’s what we’ve been repeating when parents are concerned,” Bradley said.


He added that the CDC appears to be operating under the broadest possible definition of corona symptoms when monitoring quarantine patients. The father was observed to have had a cough, but his daughter has had no symptoms to date.

“In the 15, 20 minutes that I was in the room with them, he didn’t cough once,” Bradley said. “To me, he was asymptomatic, but we were told he has a history of cough, and he was in Wuhan with people with the virus, so they wanted him in isolation.”

Cough was also the reported symptom for the first two adult patients sent to the university’s Hillcrest hospital Wednesday night, said Dr. Francesca Torriani, medical director of infection prevention and clinical epidemiology at UCSD. Like those sent to Rady, Torriani said, there wasn’t much evidence of significant illness to observe.

She called for a little compassion.


“These are American citizens who have gone through a lot in the past two weeks,” Torriani said. “They are tired, they’ve had really harrowing situations with their families, and so we should be welcoming them.”

Once test results are in, she said, hospitals will know what to do.

“If their results are negative, we expect them to go back to Miramar and complete their quarantine; if the results are positive, we follow CDC’s instructions,” she said.

It remains unclear exactly what the circumstances were on the flight from Wuhan to California that resulted in hospitalizations so quickly after touching down on the tarmac at the base formerly called Fightertown USA. The CDC said Tuesday that all evacuees had to pass detailed screenings, including temperature checks and interviews about the presence of any coronavirus symptoms, before they boarded the plane. Anyone with symptoms was not allowed to embark.


Skinner said Thursday morning that he did not know whether or not those admitted to local hospitals began coughing en-route. The CDC spokesman also said he did not know whether any of them were wearing masks during the flight.

“I think it’s fair to say that, though we did not require passengers to wear masks, the vast majority of people on that flight were wearing them,” Skinner said.

Coronavirus spreads inside the large water droplets made temporarily airborne when an infected person coughs or sneezes, and CDC guidelines advise people to stay at least six feet away from each other to significantly lessen the chances of transmission because that’s about how far such droplets can travel before they fall to the ground.

Skinner said he did not know how many people passed through the six-foot bubble around the people now hospitalized with coughs. But he was quick to note that simply passing through such a zone is not really enough to get infected. All the medical evidence collected so far points to having prolonged exposure within six feet of an infected person to get infected. Epidemiologists regularly work to trace all “close contacts” of people with communicable infections, and Skinner said that work would certainly commence, but not until test results are returned.


“If these folks come back and they’re positive for coronavirus, then, at that point, more work will be done to determine close contacts and evaluating those to see if any adjustment of quarantine periods would be in order, but we’re not there yet,” Skinner said.

On Wednesday, the CDC announced that it has mailed out some 200 special testing kits to 200 public health labs nationwide. The kits allow labs other than those at the CDC’s Atlanta headquarters to test for the presence of the particular strain of novel coronavirus that is causing the global outbreak.

Dr. Eric McDonald, medical director of the San Diego County Epidemiology and Immunization Branch, confirmed in an email Thursday that San Diego’s public health lab is among those receiving test kits. That should allow much more rapid testing by eliminating the need to transport samples across the country and also by eliminating the need for San Diego specimens to wait in line with others collected and sent in from locations across the nation. But that doesn’t mean the people currently hospitalized in San Diego will benefit. Setting up such DNA testing is not like flipping a switch.

“There is a verification process we need to do once receiving the kits to ensure accurate results, and that we are in compliance with regulations and procedures,” McDonald said. “It is difficult to say specifically how long that will take given we have not received the kits yet.”

