SAN DIEGO (KGTV) — Four people hospitalized at local hospitals after arriving at MCAS Miramar from Wuhan, China, are in stable condition, officials said.
Three adults and a child who were on the flight from Wuhan, China, to the military base were taken to UC San Diego Hospital and Rady Children’s Hospital Wednesday for "further evaluation," the base said.
Thursday, UCSD Hospital and Rady Children's Hospital officials said the patients were doing well. Officials are waiting for test results to indicate whether any of the patients have the novel coronavirus.
RELATED: Four hospitalized after flight from China lands at Miramar
"All of these patients, they are stable. These are American citizens and these persons have gone through a lot," Francesca Torriani, program director of infection prevention at UC San Diego Health, told reporters. "The risks, the measures the CDC is asking us to take are to control the spread of the disease."
Health officials said they do not believe there was any threat to the public or hospital patients.
"There's no risk to anyone coming to the hospital, the emergency rooms, anyone who gets hospitalized ... even if the patients test positive, which is unlikely," said John Bradley, medical director of infectious diseases at Rady Children’s Hospital.
Bradley said their hospital units were developed to handle possible Ebola cases and allow patients to be observed without the potential for illness spreading.
"They're only moving them because we have isolation and medical expertise and not because they're contagious or were worried that something bad would happen. Just a precaution," Bradley added.
Watch the press conference below:
Torriani said normally, these patients would not be in a hospital for their symptoms. But under federal law and CDC's policies, since they were in a high risk area and are showing some symptoms they were required to be placed isolation for observation.
The patients are not currently taking any medications outside of normal measures to address a cough, Torriani added.
San Diego health officials are now pressing the CDC to receive special testing kits that can give results in hours instead of days.
"This isn't the first coronavirus to hope from animals into people. SARS was much worse, and there was a lot of work looking for anti-virals for SARS. So there's some basic research that we can apply to this virus," Bradley said. "So we're not starting from scratch. And believe me, if in the United States we begin to see this ... we'll be working with researchers in the FDA to find experimental medicines.
