The World Health Organization said the coronavirus outbreak was a global health emergency Thursday in a move to spur more resources and greater global coordination in confronting it. Also Thursday, health officials announced the sixth confirmed case of the virus in the U.S., the first time the disease was transmitted from one person to another in the country.
The WHO’s declaration comes after it had already said it was of “great concern” to see the disease spreading person-to-person outside of China. In the U.S., the new patient is the husband of an Illinois woman who was diagnosed with the virus earlier this month.
Meanwhile, the first Americans evacuated on a U.S. government flight from the Chinese city at the center of the outbreak were likely facing at least a couple more days of isolation at a military base in Southern California, as the U.S. government planned more evacuation flights in the coming days. The first evacuees cleared initial health checks in China and then again during a stopover in Alaska on the way to the California base.
A U.S. official said earlier this week that they would be monitored for at least three days at the base — longer if illness was detected — but they were at the base voluntarily.
By Thursday morning the flu-like virus had killed at least 170 people, all of them in China. More than 7,700 others have been infected in more than a dozen countries, including six confirmed cases in the United States. More than 100 people in the U.S. were being tested for the disease across 26 states earlier this week.
Other countries have also started evacuating citizens from China on chartered flights, and some major airlines have halted all flights to and from mainland China.
