Three more cases of the new coronavirus were confirmed in the U.S. on Sunday, all in California, bringing the total number of people in the country with the disease to 11. The weekend also saw the first death blamed on the the flu-like outside of China.
As of Monday morning there were at least 17,205 confirmed cases in more than two dozen countries, the vast majority of them in China, according to the World Health Organization. There have been 361 deaths, all of them in China except for one confirmed in the Philippines over the weekend.
U.S. officials declared a public health emergency last week and, as a result, foreign nationals who have traveled to China in the last two weeks and aren’t immediate family members of U.S. citizens or permanent residents will be temporarily banned from entering the U.S. Under the orders of Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, anyone entering the U.S. who has been in China’s Hubei province in the last two weeks will be subject to a two-week quarantine.
The first 195 Americans evacuated from Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak, are under federal quarantine and will remain at a military base in Southern California until mid-February. The government hasn’t issued such a quarantine order in more than 50 years.
The State Department has warned Americans to avoid all travel to China due to the “rapidly spreading” outbreak. The decision came after the WHO designated the outbreak a global public health emergency.
