US Confirms First Case Of Deadly Coronavirus In Patient Who Visited China - CDC

WASHINGTON (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 22nd January, 2020) A traveler returning to the United States from China has become the first American case of pneumonia caused by the Novel Coronavirus, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reported in a press release on Tuesday.

"The patient recently returned from Wuhan, China, where an outbreak of pneumonia caused by this novel coronavirus has been ongoing since December 2019," the release said.

The virus was identified in a sample from a patient being treated at a hospital in the US state of Washington, the release said.

The epidemic believed to have begun in a seafood and poultry market in the southeastern Chinese city of Wuhan has sickened about 300 people in China, with cases reported in Japan, South Korea, Thailand and Taiwan.

While originally thought to be spreading from animal-to-person, there are growing indications that limited person-to-person spread is happening, although it remains unclear how readily the virus spreads between people, the CDC release said.

The CDC previously began screening travelers for Novel Coronavirus at major US airports by taking the body temperatures of travelers from Wuhan.

An outbreak of a related coronavirus was responsible for the 2003 SARS [Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome] epidemic, which sickened 8,098 people worldwide with 774 deaths, mostly in Asia, according to the UN World Health Organization (WHO).

None of the eight SARS victims identified in the United States died, a CDC fact sheet said.