New Suspected Coronavirus Cases Pop Up in Two States

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Officials across the United States probed potential cases of a new coronavirus on Thursday, while a divided World Health Organization declined to declare the deadly outbreak a health emergency and authorities confirmed the first death outside the virus’ Chinese city of origin.

Brazos County, Texas, officials said they had isolated a potential 2019 novel coronavirus patient at home, pending precautionary testing. The individual had recently visited Wuhan, China, where 17 people have died and hundreds more have fallen sick since last month. Texas A&M University confirmed that one of its students was identified as the possible case there and said the “immediate health risk to the campus community” was low.

Meanwhile, a sick individual representing another potential case in California reportedly arrived at Los Angeles International Airport from Mexico City on an American Airlines flight at about 6:45 p.m. local time on Wednesday. They were taken to the hospital with flu-like symptoms, NBC Los Angeles reported.

Six exchange students at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville were under observation because they just returned from visiting Wuhan, where two of them live. None of them had symptoms and they were not quarantined.

Officials with the CDC did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Daily Beast regarding suspected cases.

A patient in Washington state was announced as the first official U.S. case of the virus on Tuesday.

Also on Thursday, an emergency committee convened in Geneva by the World Health Organization decided against declaring a global health emergency and planned to re-evaluate the issue in 10 days, while acknowledging the “urgency” of the situation. Such a declaration is rare and reserved for “serious, sudden, unusual or unexpected” outbreaks and would have given the organization broader authority to shape global responses to the virus, reported The New York Times. The organization said in a press release that committee members were split, with some believing it was “still too early” to designate the outbreak a global health emergency.

Two days earlier, the CDC announced the first U.S. case of the virus in Washington state: a man in his 30s who became ill days after returning from Wuhan, China on Jan. 15. Because of the man’s travel history, officials collected a clinical specimen and sent it to the CDC overnight, where laboratory testing confirmed the diagnosis through a real time reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction test, also known as rRT-PCR.

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