The Coast Guard rushed testing kits to a cruise ship quarantined off the coast of California on Thursday as the number of new cases and deaths related to the coronavirus in the US continued to rise.
California joined the list of states declaring emergencies as the virus spreads. So far, 11 deaths have been linked to the virus, with 150 confirmed cases across the country.
The authorities in the Seattle area stepped up their efforts to contain an outbreak there, the worst so far in the country, closing a school district that serves 20,000 students — part of a global disruption that has affected roughly 300 million students.
A Seattle nursing home at the centre of the outbreak will be the subject of a federal investigation by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Most of the 10 victims of the virus in Washington have been residents of the facility, the Life Care Centre in Kirkland.
Another fatality was reported late on Wednesday in California, a 69-year-old man who had recently travelled aboard the detained cruise ship, the Grand Princess, which remains at sea while passengers are tested for the virus.
On the East Coast, the number of confirmed cases in New York jumped to 11, including a patient whose source of infection remained unclear. Hundreds of people who had contact with known patients were ordered to isolate themselves as transit officials sought to reassure a jittery public that the trains and subways were safe to ride.
With the prospect that the virus was spreading locally, there was a growing sense of anxiety in the city of New Rochelle in Westchester County, about 5 miles from the northern border of New York City. Normally crowded stores and shops were seeing a drop in business, and state officials warned of more cases to come.
Reports of the first positive case in New Jersey brought the number of states with infected patients to 17.
As the sense of urgency grew, lawmakers in Congress said they would devote $8.3 billion to fighting the virus. However, even as the federal authorities promised to step up testing and relaxed guidelines so that anyone could be tested with a doctor’s approval, there were concerns that the demand could overwhelm the health care system.
A cruise ship returning to California from Hawaii that has suspected links to two coronavirus cases, one of them fatal, is being held off the coast of San Francisco as public health officials prepared to screen everyone on the ship, governor Gavin Newsom of California said on Wednesday.
Eleven passengers and 10 crew members on the boat were showing symptoms on Wednesday, the governor said. “That number may significantly understate” the scope of infection, he said, or “it may indeed be abundance of caution.”
“The ship will not come on shore until we appropriately assess the passengers,” Newsom added.
The governor also said that the state was declaring a state of emergency to help mobilise its response to the coronavirus outbreak. The number of cases in the state shot up to 54 on Wednesday, the most in the nation.
Newsom said that about 2,500 people, more than half of them Californians, had been aboard the ship, identified by its owners as the Grand Princess, during a recent voyage to Mexico from San Francisco.
One of those passengers died on Wednesday in Placer county, California, the first US coronavirus death outside Washington state and the 11th over all. Another passenger was being treated for the illness in Sonoma county. State and federal officials were racing to contact others who had been onboard.
Newsom said the ship had gone on to Hawaii after its stop in Mexico, and then had sailed back toward California with some passengers from the original San Francisco-to-Mexico leg of the voyage still onboard.
The person who died in Placer county had underlying health conditions and had been in isolation at a hospital after falling ill. Officials believe the patient was probably exposed to the virus on the San Francisco-to-Mexico part of the voyage last month.
