The wife, son, daughter, and neighbor of the New York man who was the state’s first case of coronavirus spread in the community have tested positive for the new virus, officials said on Wednesday.
There are now six confirmed cases in New York.
The new cases include a male student at Yeshiva University in New York City, prompting the closure of one of the college’s campuses. The man’s daughter attends SAR Acadamy and High School in the Bronx borough of the city. That school was closed on Tuesday when the man’s case was first announced.
Westchester Day School in Mamaroneck and Westchester Torah Academy in White Plains, two schools in Westchester, closed as precautions due to possible exposure to the confirmed cases.
The family of the man, who is in serious condition at a Manhattan hospital, were isolated at home while testing was done.
The neighbor of the family drove the man to the hospital in Westchester, an area just outside the city, on Feb. 27, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo told reporters at a press conference. The male patient was transferred to New York-Presbyterian/Columbia University Irving Medical Center in Manhattan on March 2.
Cuomo also said that 300 State University of New York and City University of New York students and faculty in China, Italy, Japan, Iran, and South Korea will be told to return to the United States.
Yeshiva University announced earlier Wednesday that a student tested positive for COVID-19, which is caused by the virus.
“Our thoughts and prayers are with him and his family as well as to all those affected,” it said in a health alert on Wednesday morning. Precautions include canceling all classes on Wilf Campus in the neighborhood of Washington Heights in the northern part of the borough of Manhattan for Wednesday. That includes in-person graduate courses on that campus as well as at the boys’ high school.
All classes and operations at the other campuses would continue as normal, the university said. It previously said that it was disinfecting all relevant common areas.
Two people who came into contact with the 20-year-old student were transferred to Bellevue Hospital for testing, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio told reporters on Wednesday.
A day earlier, he said that the Yeshiva student was showing symptoms but his sister was not.
The father of the students was the first case of community spread, health officials said. Community spread means the source of the infection isn’t known.
The patient, a man in his 50s, works at the Lewis and Garbuz law firm in the Manhattan borough of New York City and traveled to Miami, Florida in early February.
De Blasio highlighted that current data on the new virus show about 80 percent of patients experience symptoms similar to the flu and recover without hospitalization. The other 20 percent, international health officials have said, require hospitalization, with a percentage of those requiring intensive care and a smaller percentage requiring some form of mechanical ventilation.
The lethality for the new virus is around 2 percent, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, said at a press conference last month. The lethality of the flu is 0.1 percent.
The virus emerged in late 2019 in China and has spread to dozens of countries around the world. There are dozens of cases in the United States, primarily on the West Coast.
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