US CDC prepares for any new virus uptick

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said Wednesday that preparations were underway to tackle the novel coronavirus as it could "take a foothold in the US" after it killed 1,115 people mainly in China.

Dr Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC's National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases said: "At some point we are likely to see community spread in the US or in other countries. This will trigger a change in our response strategy."

There have been 45,171 coronavirus cases confirmed in 25 countries. The US has 13 confirmed cases of the disease, which is now been named COVID-19 by the World Health Organization (WHO).

The CDC said that it had screened 30,000 passengers from China at 11 US airports designated to conduct enhanced screenings.

At least 420 people have been tested for the coronavirus in 41 states. Of that group, 13 tested positive, 327 negative and 60 tests are still pending.

The numbers are cumulative since Jan 21 and include people with a travel history that includes China as well as those who have been in close contact with confirmed cases or other people under investigation.

On Tuesday, the CDC said that a mistake at a lab led a woman infected with the virus to mistakenly be released from a hospital in San Diego, California.

The patient had been evacuated from Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak, last week.

The error was spotted as she was returning to a San Diego military base where more than 200 evacuees from China are under quarantine. She was quickly sent back to hospital.

Dr Christopher Braden, who leads the CDC's delegation in San Diego said that officials caught the mistake while they were being driven back to Marine Corps Air Station Miramar.

Several other patients who were being observed for symptoms of COVID-19 were released from UC San Diego Medical Center after their tests came back negative.

Most of the people who were released from the base left immediately to visit family in the US. Others stayed to make travel arrangements.

Jamie Fouss, the US consul general in Wuhan, who was among those released, told reporters: "Today as we took off our masks and were given the clean bill of health, we all realized we had gone through this experience together, and we made good friends."

Messonnier said the CDC was actively trying to keep the American public safe by speaking with manufacturers of masks and gloves to ensure there would be enough in the event of an outbreak.

But some of the coronavirus testing kits that the CDC sent to US states and 30 other countries do not work.

The kits were supposed to allow states to conduct their own testing instead of sending them to CDC headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia.

The US still has relatively few cases of COVID-19, but its travel industry could lose $5.8 billion in airfare and domestic spending, according to Tourism Economics, a consulting firm.

US airlines have canceled flights to China through April 2020. The US also has banned noncitizens from entering if they have previously visited China in the last two weeks.

Chinese tourists contributed $35 billion to the US economy in 2018, according to figures from the US Travel Association.

Hotels may also see a 0.3 percent drop in revenue if at least 4.6 million overnight stays are lost due to the virus, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Amid global panic over how the virus is spread, there is currently no evidence that the novel coronavirus can pass from a mother to a child in the womb, according to a study published Wednesday in the medical journal The Lancet.

The small study of nine women in Wuhan tracked women in their third trimesters of pregnancy. Each woman had coronavirus pneumonia and was treated from Jan 20 through Jan 31.