Washington state confirms 2 new coronavirus cases, 1 of unknown origin
WHO raises coronavirus threat assessment to highest level
Fox News medical correspondent Dr. Marc Siegel joins ‘The Five’ to discuss outbreak concerns.
Washington state health officials confirmed two new presumptive cases of coronavirus late Friday, including a teenager who hadn’t traveled out of the U.S. recently.
The teen was in home isolation and the student’s high school, in Snohomish County north of Seattle, will be closed through Wednesday for deep cleaning, Q13 FOX in Seattle reported. (A similar school cleaning was being planned in Oregon after a presumptive coronavirus case there was linked to a school employee.)
Health officials said it’s a “possible instance of community spread.”
The second case involves a King County woman in her 50s who recently returned from South Korea, which had nearly 3,000 cases of the virus by Friday evening.
She’s recovering without complications, Seattle’s KIRO-TV reported.
“While the King County case is believed to be travel-related, we don’t know how or where the new Snohomish County case was infected,” a statement from the Washington State Department of Health said, according to Q13. “We are working hard to find and identify how the patients were exposed as well as tracing people who might have been exposed to this patient.”
The teen had been out of school most of the week except for briefly Friday morning.
The students the teen was in contact with will stay home for two weeks and be monitored by the Snohomish Health District, KIRO reported. The patient’s sibling will also be in quarantine until test results come back.
Only one other person in Washington has tested positive for the virus — a man who returned from Wuhan, China, the epicenter of the outbreak. He become the first known case in the U.S. and has since been released from a hospital.
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“Given the extent of global spread, we expect to identify more individuals with COVID-19 in Washington,” State Health Officer Dr. Kathy Lofy said, according to Q13.
