Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar declared the coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency in the U.S. on Friday. Azar announced that President Trump signed an order that will temporarily ban foreign nationals from entering the U.S. if they have traveled to China in the last two weeks and aren’t immediate family members of U.S. citizens or permanent residents.
The order takes effect on Sunday at 5 p.m. ET. Also under the order, anyone traveling into the U.S. who has been in China’s Hubei province, the epicenter of the outbreak, in the last two weeks will be quarantined for two weeks.
The new measures come after U.S. health officials issued a federal quarantine order for the 195 Americans evacuated from Wuhan, Hubei’s provincial capital. The group of U.S. government workers and private Americans will remain at a military base in Southern California until mid-February, Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, told reporters Friday.
The government hasn’t issued such a quarantine order in over 50 years, Messonnier said. She said the order was issued because of the “unprecedented public health threat” of the outbreak; none of the quarantined Americans have tested positive for the virus.
The order was announced after the State Department warned Americans to avoid all travel to China due to the “rapidly spreading” outbreak. The decision came after the World Health Organization designated the outbreak a global public health emergency in an attempt to get more resources and increase international coordination to fight it.
The U.S. now has six confirmed cases of the virus, the most recent being the first confirmed instance of the disease spreading from person-to-person in the country. The new patient, announced Thursday, is the husband of an Illinois woman who was diagnosed with the virus earlier this month.
By Friday morning the flu-like virus had killed at least 213 people, all of them in China. Almost 9,900 people are infected there, with about 130 cases in 22 other countries.
The U.S., along with many other countries, has begun evacuating citizens from China on chartered flights, and a fast-rising number of major airlines have halted all flights to and from mainland China.
