One week removed from the first of two coronavirus quarantine planes landing in San Diego, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed San Diego’s second novel coronavirus case Wednesday afternoon.

Like the first, which was announced Monday, the infected patient is an evacuee hospitalized with UC San Diego Health System though the second confirmed case was aboard the second flight to land at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar on Friday.

The university also said Wednesday that it has received an additional patient with a persistent cough from the quarantined group of evacuees living at Miramar, bringing the total to nine quarantine patients with possible infection since last Wednesday. As of Tuesday evening, five of the nine had tested negative.

A tenth person in San Diego County is also under investigation for coronavirus infection but is not part of the government’s quarantine at Miramar.


John Cihomsky, vice president of communications at Sharp HealthCare, said by email Wednesday evening that medical personnel at Sharp Chula Vista Medical Center evaluated a patient for possible coronavirus infection Wednesday evening.

“Under the direction of San Diego (County) Public Health, the patient has been discharged from the hospital, and the patient will be followed by public health,” Cihomsky said.

Though he did acknowledge that all suspected coronavirus cases are to be quarantined for 14 days, the executive declined to say more about where the person was sent after they left the hospital or what their potential exposure to novel coronavirus was. He referred all additional questions to the county’s public health department, which was not available Wednesday evening.

Meanwhile, the region’s second confirmed case went much more smoothly than the first.


Unlike was the case Sunday when the first patient was removed from a local hospital due to a mistaken negative test result, no such mix-up occurred for the second confirmed case.

Dr. Francesca Torriani, medical director of infection prevention and clinical epidemiology at UCSD, said in an email that the patient whose infection was confirmed Wednesday has suffered from high fevers, fatigue and dry cough that developed two days after flying from Wuhan.

All three patients — the two whose infections have been confirmed and the third who arrived Wednesday — are considered to be in “very stable” condition.

All are being cared for in rooms isolated from other hospital units and equipped with special negative pressure air-handling equipment designed to keep any airborne pathogen from spreading.


Torriani said that some patients have expressed concern when arriving at university hospitals, given the amount of media attention that quarantine cases have received both in San Diego County and nationwide. That concern tends to lessen, she said, when hospital staff explain how treatment is handled.

“In general, patients understand that it’s our role as an academic health system to care for the most challenging cases,” Torriani said. “It’s what we do.”

Coronavirus, while it has received outsize attention in San Diego County this week and last, is far from the most serious health threat that the public faces.

The latest weekly influenza report from the county health department lists seven additional flu-related deaths, bringing the season total to 57. That total includes five who died just last week, and three of those died on the same day, Tuesday Feb. 4. Just three of the seven who died were vaccinated but all had other underlying medical conditions. Four were women, three were men and ages ranged from 60 to 89. Overall, the number of confirmed flu cases across the region shrunk a bit last week, falling from 1,689 to 1,548. Flu symptoms observed in local emergency departments held steady at 8 percent of cases.

