Arizona health officials said Friday that they have yet to determine how a third patient with the new coronavirus became infected.
Public health officials from Maricopa County and Pinal County, where the patient worked and lived, respectively, said they are treating this new coronavirus case as stemming from “community spread.” The patient is a woman in her 40s who is a health-care worker in metro Phoenix.
She nor any of her “close contacts” had recently traveled to a country with widespread COVID-19 cases.
She is hospitalized in stable condition in Maricopa County.
The two previous Arizona cases involved people in metro Phoenix.
Meanwhile, the Pima County Health Department has assessed 79 returning travelers from China, but no cases of the coronavirus have been confirmed locally, Pima County Administrator Chuck Huckelberry said Friday.
The county will provide daily, weekday updates regarding the coronavirus on various social platforms through videos featuring Dr. Bob England, the director of the Health Department, and online at pima.gov/covid19, Huckelberry said in a memo.
Huckelberry said the county expects local cases and that the impact here will likely look “something like a bad flu season.”
“There have been calls by some in our community to close schools, shutter businesses, or cancel events because of the mere threat of the virus coming to Pima County, not just when (and it’s likely going to be when, not if), there is a confirmed case here,” he wrote in the memo. “Doing so will only cause severe economic and social disruption beyond what we already experience and will have little to no effect on containing the spread of the virus. We do not close schools due to the flu, and we are going through a pretty bad flu season currently, and we should not close schools and the like for COVID-19.”
Washing hands with soap and water and not touching your face continues to be the best way to decrease the spread of the virus, officials said.
The virus spreads through the air when an infected person coughs or sneezes. The symptoms are thought to appear between two and 14 days after exposure, the department said. Children appear to have milder forms of the respiratory illness and aren’t at risk for “severe disease,” said Dr. Rebecca Sunenshine, of the Maricopa County Department of Public Health.
“Just like the flu, the vast majority of people will have mild symptoms and completely recover without any treatment at home,” Sunenshine said.
The woman’s case was the second identified through testing by a state health lab.
Meanwhile, three firefighters and two ambulance workers in Scottsdale remain in quarantine at their homes after treating a patient who later tested positive for the new coronavirus. They have not displayed any symptoms, according to Maricopa County Public Health officials.
The man they treated last week was the state’s second patient with the new coronavirus. A hospitality company that operates two nightclubs in Scottsdale said one of their employees with “a communicable disease” was at both places briefly on Sunday. In a Facebook post, Riot Hospitality Group said it has hired a professional cleaning company to do a deep-cleaning of both establishments as a precaution.
Health officials have said there is no public health danger at either nightclub.
The potential for COVID-19 to spread means that health-care workers who have been exposed will only be asked to isolate if they show symptoms.
“If someone is exposed, we are allowing them to continue working but monitoring them closely,” Sunenshine said. “That’s how we’re making sure we are not in a situation where we don’t have enough health-care workers.”
