A laboratory technician works with a pipette at the Institute of Virology at the Charité Berlin Mitte, where investigations on coronavirus are underway.
Christophe Gateau | Getty Images
The third U.S. case of coronavirus has been confirmed in Orange County, California, the OC Health Care Agency’s Communicable Disease Control Division announced in a press release Sunday.
“The OC Health Care Agency’s (HCA) Communicable Disease Control Division received confirmation from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) this evening that an Orange County, California case has tested positive for the novel coronavirus,” the agency said.
The patient has been described as a traveler from Wuhan, China — the epicenter of the disease’s outbreak — and is in isolation in a hospital in “good condition,” according to the release.
The new respiratory illness has so far sickened more than 1,975 people and killed 56, the majority of which are in Wuhan.
The HCA said it will be monitoring any close contacts, but that there is “no evidence that person-to-person transmission has occurred in Orange County.”
According to the CDC’s guidance, people who have “casual contact with a case” — for instance, it says, in the same grocery store or movie theater — “are at minimal risk of developing infection.”
“The current risk of local transmission remains low,” the HCA said.
