

The workers at the Vacaville hospital where the patient first went have also been isolated, Garamendi said.

"We do know that 84 medical personnel at the hospital in Vacaville have been sent home through self-quarantine. They were in a situation where they could have been infected," Garamendi said.

Rep. Jimmy Gomez, D-Los Angeles, said the whistleblower recently contacted his office, also alleging retaliation by higher-ups for having flagged safety issues.

“My concern from the moment I heard it is that individuals at HHS are not taking the complaints of HHS employees seriously," Gomez said in an interview. “Their superiors are not supposed to brush them off. By retaliating against people if they do call out a problem, that only discourages other people from ever reporting violations.”

HHS said it was “evaluating the complaint.”

“We take all whistleblower complaints very seriously and are providing the complainant all appropriate protections under the Whistleblower Protection Act," HHS spokeswoman Caitlin Oakley said in a statement.

Gomez's office said the complaint was filed by a high-ranking official at the Administration for Children and Families, an HHS social service agency.

The whistleblower was among a team of about a dozen employees from the agency who had been deployed to help connect the evacuees with government assistance that they might qualify for to ease their return. The team was there from mid-January until earlier this month.

Although team members had gloves at times and masks at other times, they lacked full protective gear and received no training on how to protect themselves in a viral hot zone, according to a description provided by the congressional office. They also had no respirators. While helping the evacuees, team members noticed that workers from the CDC were in full gear to protect them from getting sick.

Gomez's office said the high-ranking whistleblower complained to superiors and was given the choice of being reassigned or being fired. Gomez said as far as he knows none of the workers from the agency has become infected with the virus.

The COVID-19 illness caused by a new coronavirus that emerged in December in the Chinese city of Wuhan has stretched well beyond Asia. The global count of those infected as of Friday exceeds 83,000, with China still by far the hardest-hit country. Dozens of cases but no deaths have been confirmed in the United States.

Democratic White House hopefuls have seized on President Trump’s delayed response to the coronavirus outbreak, calling it the latest evidence of his incompetence and warning that the crisis may only deepen as a result.

Trump tweeted that “The Do Nothing Democrats" had wasted time on impeachment and “anything else they could do to make the Republican Party look bad" while defending his own response to the virus outbreak, which many across the aisle have deemed sluggish and scattershot.