Monday, February 17, 2020

71,438/1775. 454 infected on Diamond Princess cruise ship. Heated discussion last evening (see above) with Bob Kadlec, Will Walters (State Med), Anne Schuchat, Kevin (ASPR) about whether to board people on the evacuation 747 plane who were originally scheduled to come home as “uninfected” after they just found out that 14 of them are in fact infected. The written agreement is that no documented infected people should get on the evac plane. Walters, Kevin and to some extent Bob Kadlec (he was complicit) insisted that since they were already on the bus, we should allow them on the plane. They said that we would not know what to do with them if they stayed since we could not leave them on the ship and the Japanese did not have facilities to take care of them (I do not believe the latter). Anne Schuchat vehemently argued that they should not be allowed to board since the public and written agreement was that they would be put on a plane WITHOUT infected people and this would be breaking that agreement. Nonetheless, Walters pushed and Kadlec (ASPR) caved and went along. Of note, later on (today) Walters said that he checked with me and I was OK with the boarding – a lie! On the call today Azar was upset since the entire Cabinet was questioning why we let them board and when he asked our stance, he heard that we (HHS) disagreed. He was upset that we did not speak with one voice and this looked bad. On the call today, I told him that State (Walters) was going to do what he wanted to do anyway no matter what we said. Of note, on these issues in foreign countries, State has the last word. Several of the 14 infected people from ship who were evacuated went to Nebraska. Also 3 additional people were notified while on the plane that they were infected. We air evacuated 328 people from Diamond Princess. 61 Americans elected to stay in Japan on the ship, but the Japanese want them off the ship because transmission is occurring on the ship. There are now 800+ non-China cases, 365 of which are on Diamond Princess. Now 28 countries have cases and within these there are 183 human to human transmissions. Singapore is problem with 68% of their cases are human to human PRESS: WTOP Radio; FOX (Caputo) TV; FOX Business TV; CNN (Wolf Blitzer Situation Room).