As we first reported on Monday, shortly after the US decided to break the quarantine surrounding the Diamond Princess cruise ship which had emerged as the single-biggest locus of coronavirus cases outside of China, hundreds of weary, homesick Americans were on their way home. And as more than a dozen buses sat on the tarmac at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport with 328 Americans wearing surgical masks and gloves inside, awaiting anxiously to fly home after weeks in quarantine aboard the Diamond Princess, U.S. officials wrestled with troubling news: new test results showed that 14 passengers were infected with the virus. The problem: the U.S. State Department had promised that no one with the infection would be allowed to board the planes.
A decision had to be made. Let them all fly? Or leave them behind in Japanese hospitals? At this point, according to the Washington Post, a fierce debate broke out in Washington, where it was still Sunday afternoon: The State Department and a top Trump administration health official wanted to forge ahead. The infected passengers had no symptoms and could be segregated on the plane in a plastic-lined enclosure (something we mocked on Monday when we said “we can only hope that “plastic divider” was enough to keep the virus confined to its own class aboard the aircraft.”). At this point, officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention disagreed, contending they could still spread the virus. The CDC believed the 14 should not be flown back with uninfected passengers.
“It was like the worst nightmare,” said a senior U.S. official involved in the decision, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. “Quite frankly, the alternative could have been pulling grandma out in the pouring rain, and that would have been bad, too.”
In the end, the State Department won the argument. But unhappy CDC officials demanded to be left out of the news release that explained that infected people were being flown back to the United States — a move that would nearly double the number of known coronavirus cases in this country.
In retrospect, the CDC will soon be proven correct in its dire warning that repatriating a full plane of both infected and healthy individuals could be a catastrophic error, because it now appears that not only can the virus remain latent for as long as 42 days, 4 weeks longer than traditionally assumed, resulting in numerous false negative cases as infected carrier slip across borders undetected, but far more ominously, it now appears that the diseases can re-infect recently “cured” patients, because as Taiwan News reports, a Chinese patient who just recovered from the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) has been infected for the second time in the province of Sichuan, according to local health officials. – READ MORE
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