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US Unprepared to Meet its First COVID Evacuees from Wuhan Last Year

VOA News

   Federal officials at a California military base last year who met with
   the first American evacuees from Wuhan, China, the place where the
   coronavirus emerged, were not prepared for their mission, according to
   The Washington Post.

   They did not wear masks and had "no virus prevention plan or
   infection-control training" when they met with the evacuees, the Post
   said, according to two federal reports the newspaper said it has
   obtained.

   The newspaper reported on its website late Thursday that the reports
   supported "a whistleblower's account of the chaos as U.S. officials
   scrambled to greet nearly 200 evacuees" who eventually did not test
   positive for the coronavirus.

   The whistleblower's complaint, however, resulted in "internal reviews
   by the Health and Human Services Department and an investigation
   overseen by the Office of Special Counsel," the Post said.

   According to the newspaper's account, the federal officials who first
   interacted with the Wuhan evacuees at March Air Reserve Base in
   Riverside County, California, were instructed to remove their
   protective gear when meeting with the evacuees to avoid "bad optics."
   ((bad appearances))

   The Health and Human Services general counsel's office, headed by
   Robert Charrow, a Trump appointee, conducted a campaign against the
   whistleblower among members of Congress who received from HHS an
   account of what the agency said was the whistleblower's conflicting
   information. That HHS move was "reprehensible," Special Counsel Henry
   Kerner said in a letter to President Joe Biden on Thursday. Kerner
   praised the whistleblower's "tremendous courage in bringing these
   allegations forward."

   There are more than 101 million global COVID-19 infections, the disease
   caused by the coronavirus, Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center
   reported early Friday. The U.S. tops the list with more than 25 million
   cases, followed by India with 10.7 million infections and Brazil with 9
   million. More than 2 million people have died from the disease, Johns
   Hopkins said.

   A World Health Organization team of investigators, having completed
   a14-day quarantine, began working Friday in China on their mission to
   uncover the origins of the coronavirus.

   One of the investigators' first stops was the hospital in Wuhan where
   some of the first COVID patients were treated.

   The WHO team is also expected to visit a Wuhan seafood market
   associated with the first cases, the Wuhan Institute of Virology and a
   lab of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

   The novel coronavirus emerged in Wuhan in late 2019 and has since
   spread around the world.

   More than 120 countries have called for an independent investigation
   into the origins of the virus, with many governments accusing China of
   not doing enough to contain its spread.

   Letitia James, the New York state attorney general, said Thursday the
   administration of Gov.Andrew Cuomo has severely undercounted the
   state's COVID-19 nursing home deaths. She suggested that the count was
   off by as much as 50%.

   New York's Health Department corroborated James' suspicions later
   Thursday, adding more than 3,800 deaths to nursing homes, increasing
   the nursing home death toll by 40%.

   The new nursing home number does not change New York's death toll,
   however, but it does bring into question the state's policy of
   returning nursing home residents who had been treated in hospitals for
   COVID back to the nursing homes. Cuomo maintains he was following
   federal guidelines.

   Health officials in South Carolina say they have detected two cases of
   the South African COVID-19 variant, the first cases in the United
   States.

   So far, the variant does not appear to cause more serious illness, but
   the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a statement
   that "preliminary data suggests this variant may spread more easily and
   quickly than other variants."

   "That's frightening," because it means there are likely more undetected
   cases within the state, Dr. Krutika Kuppalli, an infectious diseases
   physician at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston,
   said in an interview with CBS News. "It's probably more widespread."

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