Judge temporarily halts transfer of coronavirus patients to quarantine facility in California city.
A city in California won a battle against the state Friday, at least temporarily, when a judge halted the transfer of people diagnosed with the coronavirus to its community for a quarantine site.
Costa Mesa, California, filed a legal action after it learned federal officials planned to use its Fairview Development Center to house and quarantine several patients who tested positive for the COVID-19 virus.
The city said it was given little notice, and without input, about the plan.
“We have received no information regarding how the facility will be prepared, what precautions will be taken to protect those in the facility as well as those who live nearby, and other important planning measures,” Costa Mesa Mayor Katrina Foley said in a statement.
Judge Josephine Staton, according to the city, issued the temporary restraining order late Friday night. An expedited hearing is expected to be held Monday afternoon.
It has been more than seven weeks since the coronavirus outbreak started in Wuhan, China. Since then, at least 2,250 people have died and more than 76,000 have gotten sick.
The virus’ continued spread prompts an obvious question: When will this end?
A recent study from the Chinese Center for Disease Control found that illnesses in China may have peaked on February 1, when the largest number of patients started showing symptoms. That could be a sign that the outbreak is already tapering off, but the researchers also warned that it could rebound once Chinese residents return to school and work.
“The data from China continue to show a decline in new confirmed cases,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organization, said at a press conference on Thursday. “We’re encouraged by this trend, but this is no time for complacency.”
Lauren Ancel Meyers, an epidemiologist at the University of Texas at Austin, told Business Insider that one important figure can tell us when the outbreak has run its course. It’s the average number of people that a single patient is expected to infect. Epidemiologists call it the “basic reproduction number,” and it indicates how contagious a virus is.
When the outbreak is winding down, Meyers said, the basic reproduction will be below one.
“That means, on average, every person is infecting fewer than one other person and then the outbreak should burn out,” she said.
That’s not the case yet. A recent study of nearly 140 hospitalized patients in Wuhan estimated that the basic reproduction number for the coronavirus is 2.2, meaning that patients have been spreading the virus to more than two other people, on average. A study in the Journal of Travel Medicine estimated that the reproduction number was slightly higher: around 3.3.