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Mayor Ron Nirenberg and Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff said Tuesday they’ve asked the Pentagon to keep potential coronavirus patients at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland rather than transport them to local civilian hospitals for testing and isolation.

In a letter sent to Defense Secretary Mark Esper, Nirenberg and Wolff said they consulted with local hospital systems before making their request to stop the practice of moving mildly ill patients to the Texas Center for Infectious Disease and driving them off the base for medical tests.

They said their goal is to ensure the city continues to have the capacity to treat the sickest patients while limiting local residents’ exposure to the highly contagious virus.

The letter underscores a divide between local health experts and the Defense Department, which has required evacuees to be taken by a specialized ambulance to medical facilities in San Antonio when they appear to be ill and require testing or hospitalization.

“We’re not at loggerheads with the CDC. I think they know exactly what ought to be done,” Wolff said, referring to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “It’s a difference of opinion with the military, the Department of Defense, I might say.”

Wolff said the hotel where the evacuees are living is fenced off and guarded by marshals.

“It’s not a threat to the rest of the base,” he said. “In fact, most of the people at that base live in San Antonio, so we don’t think it’s a threat to the military. But we do think it’s a big threat when you transport them out into our community.”

Wolff and Nirenberg wrote that they understood the Pentagon wants “to prevent active duty personnel from contracting the virus, thereby affecting military combat readiness.” But both also noted the evacuees are isolated on the installation, and that testing and evaluation assets exist on the base — including the Wilford Hall Ambulatory Surgical Center, a state-of-the-art medical facility just a short drive from the hotel.

On ExpressNews.com: CDC warns of possible virus spread in U.S.

The mayor had not received a response from Esper early Tuesday evening, and the Defense Department did not respond to questions sent earlier in the day.

The judge and mayor say their letter was prompted by a conference call Nirenberg ordered Friday with more than three dozen health-care experts.

“The consensus became very strong … that they should not be moving these people unless they have symptoms, they’ve been tested and the test is confirmed,” Wolff said.

Those concerns aren’t new. Wolff raised the issue in a Feb. 18 letter to U.S. Rep. Chip Roy, R-San Antonio, asking the Defense Department to update “current procedures to test quarantined individuals at Lackland … on the base instead of transporting them to a local hospital.”

Roy, in turn, sent a letter the same day to U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar listing 11 questions, one of which asked, “Does the extra transportation and movement of sick patients put San Antonio and Bexar County residents further at risk?”

It wasn’t clear if Azar contacted Roy, whose office did not respond to a San Antonio Express-News query.

A warning from CDC official Dr. Nancy Messonnier, who said in a media telebriefing Tuesday that the agency is “preparing as if we are going to see community spread in the near term,” alarmed Wolff further.

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“I was worried last week, I worried all week long and then I got a bit more concerned today when the CDC … put out that strong statement,” Wolff said. “I thought, wow, what does she know that maybe we don’t know? Did you read her statement? ‘We’re asking the American public to work with us, to prepare for the expectation that this is going to be bad.’”

Messonnier is director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases.

The Washington Post reported that Azar and other top health officials, in a hastily convened afternoon news conference held after the Dow fell 800 points in the wake of the CDC’s warning, downplayed Messonnier’s statement, saying the United States wanted to have a large-scale response prepared “just in case” there was person-to-person spread.

“We believe the immediate risk here in the United States remains low, and we’re working hard to keep that risk low,” said Anne Schuchat, the CDC’s principal deputy director.

At Lackland, six of 235 evacuees from a flight out of Wuhan, China, that arrived Feb. 7 and passengers from the Diamond Princess cruise ship have tested positive for coronavirus and required care, Wolff and Nirenberg wrote.

On ExpressNews.com: Six evacuees at Lackland have virus

Their letter, which was emailed Monday to the Pentagon, said more than 18 evacuees had been transported from Lackland to local hospitals or the Texas Center for Infectious Disease. Most of those sent to Methodist Hospital | Texsan and the Center for Infectious Disease either had asymptomatic positive tests or very mild signs or symptoms.

Those patients, they wrote, “filled valuable beds with patients who could appropriately be managed in isolation at JBSA-Lackland. The negative-pressure isolation beds in these facilities are valuable, but limited, commodities that should be reserved for the sickest of our patients.”

Nirenberg and Wolff went on to say the policy is unintentionally forcing CDC and Health and Human Services’ staff “to use methods that are counter to prudent management of a contagion in a quarantine environment, and it is resulting in the unnecessary transport of evacuees” to hospitals or other areas in the city.

“The concern is if new evacuees from the cruise ship cohort come back with a large number of positives, we’ll be faced with a situation based on the (Defense Department) policy that we would have to move the evacuees off base very quickly and in large number, and that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense if what we’re trying to do is preserve capacity to treat known infected patients in local hospitals,” Nirenberg said.

“It’s really about making sure that we have capacity available to deliver the best care in the safest manner possible to any known infected evacuees,” he added. “And that is why we are asking (the Defense Department) to change their policy that has them move people off base so quickly with no medical reason for doing so.”

sigc@express-news.net