Coronavirus’ spread in the U.S. may be a question of when, not if
Communities in the United States need to prepare for wider spread of the new coronavirus, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned February 25. “Cases of COVID-19 are appearing without a known source of exposure ” in countries outside of China, including Hong Kong, Italy, Iran and South Korea, Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said in a news briefing. “Ultimately, we expect we will see community spread in this country.” So far, the few dozen U.S. cases have been confined to people who had traveled to China’s Hubei Provence, which is the epicenter of the outbreak, and their close contacts or to passengers evacuated from the Diamond Princess, the cruise ship quarantined off the coast of Japan. But unlike the flu, COVID-19 isn’t currently spreading in the community. And the COVID-19 outbreak has yet to be declared a pandemic (SN: 2/25/20), a designation of how widely SARS-CoV-2, the responsible virus, is spreading around the world....