Don’t Send Them Here: Local Officials Resist Plans to House Coronavirus Patients
The scramble to find places to quarantine American coronavirus patients is beginning to run into resistance from local officials who do not want the patients housed in their backyards.
 © Leonard Ortiz/The Orange County Register, via Associated Press At the request of local officials, a federal judge has temporarily blocked the state of California from housing people who have tested positive for the coronavirus at the Fairview Developmental Center, a nearly vacant state hospital in Costa Mesa. The city of Costa Mesa, Calif., has gone to court to block state and federal officials, at least temporarily, from placing dozens of people evacuated from Asia in a state-owned residential center in their community.
And Alabama officials have reacted with alarm to news that coronavirus patients could be sent as early as Wednesday to a Federal Emergency Management building on a former army base in Anniston, Ala., about 90 miles west of Atlanta.
Uncertainty and distrust are stymieing federal attempts to plan for quarantining Americans who are infected with the coronavirus. At least 34 people in the United States have tested positive for the virus, most of them after traveling abroad, and the authorities have warned of the seriousness of the threat.
So far, no one in the United States has died of the disease, and at least four patients in this country are said to have fully recovered. Yet local officials have expressed concerns that little is being done to prepare for a potential influx of patients, and that much is still unknown about the virus, which has killed at least 2,461 people, all but 19 of them in mainland China.
 © Hector Amezcua/Associated Press Ambulances stood by at Travis Air Force Base in California after Americans exposed to the coronavirus on a cruise ship arrived at the base last week. State and federal officials are seeking quarantine housing for those who have tested positive for the virus. At a hastily called news conference on Saturday, elected officials in Costa Mesa, a city of 113,000 people about 40 miles south of Los Angeles, expressed opposition to a state plan to send dozens of patients to the Fairview Developmental Center, a nearly vacant state hospital formerly used for people with developmental disabilities.
“We’re a compassionate community,” said the city’s mayor, Katrina Foley. “But we are not going to continue to be the place where everybody drops off their crises and expects us to correct it.”
The patients involved would be people now quarantined at Travis Air Force Base who have tested positive for the coronavirus but do not have severe symptoms requiring hospital care. Several people confirmed to have the virus are quarantined in their homes across the United States, but that is not an option for some, including people who do not live alone; the authorities are trying to find a secure place for them to stay. Wherever they go, they would be kept away from contact with the public until the danger of contagion passes.
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