San Antonio mayor demands extension of coronavirus quarantine, bans evacuees from entering city

San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg on Monday declared a public health emergency and demanded that 120 people who were expected to be released from a two-week quarantine at the Lackland Airforce Base be held longer for additional medical testing. He also banned quarantine evacuees from entering his city after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Saturday released a person who was later found to have a “weakly positive” test result for the new coronavirus.

“Pursuant to the statutory authority …, I, Mayor Ron Nirenberg, declare that ingress into and travel through the City of San Antonio from Lackland by those persons that have been quarantined in the facility is not permitted,” Nirenberg wrote in the declaration of public health emergency. “No previously quarantined person shall be permitted to enter the City of San Antonio until further notice.”

The evacuees’ release from Lackland Air Force Base had been put on hold as of Monday afternoon, one quarantined person told the San Antonio-Express News. The base is one of four military bases where the federal government has been sending patients who were possibly exposed to the virus in Wuhan, China, and a cruise ship in Japan.

On Monday, Gov. Greg Abbott demanded Monday that the CDC halt the scheduled release of the cruise ship evacuees on Lackland.

“What happened in San Antonio and what the CDC did is completely unacceptable,” Abbott said at a press conference. “It appears to be a case of negligence with regard to allowing this person who had the coronavirus to leave the Texas Center for Infectious Diseases and go back into the general population.”

Abbott’s office is demanding that people not be allowed to leave quarantine at Lackland “until the CDC can guarantee that they have no trace of coronavirus and pose no threat to the expansion of the coronavirus anywhere in the country.” The CDC did not immediately return a request for comment.

“There were some people who were scheduled to be leaving Lackland Air Force Base today and going back home,” Abbott said. “Our demand and our expectation is those people will not be allowed to go home today.”

During a press conference Monday morning, Anita K. Kurian, assistant director of San Antonio Metropolitan Health District, said the patient was “in the community” for about 12 hours and that the agency has identified and contacted every place the patient could have visited.

“We’ve completed a risk assessment and I can say pretty much everybody has been deemed to be low risk except for a few selected health care personnel who were directly in contact with her at the time of her release,” she said.

According to CNN, 16 people have been identified as coming in contact with the patient. Fourteen of those people are considered at low risk for exposure, while two are considered at medium risk.

Kurian said the patient visited a Holiday Inn near the airport and went to North Star Mall on Saturday. The person mostly sat by themselves in the mall’s food court and the risk of exposure at both locations is low, Kurian said. Still, health officials requested a “deep cleaning” of the mall, she said.

“It was quite a frustration Sunday all day long, trying to get the CDC to say what happened,” Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff said at Monday’s press conference.

To prevent another person from being released too soon, Abbott said the CDC should perform an additional test for the virus.

“The protocol before now has been … if there were two consecutive negative tests, meaning that the person was showing no suggestion of having coronavirus, they would be subject to being released,” Abbott said. “That was one of the mistakes here, because what happened here, there was a third test that was conducted on the woman who was released, she was released before the test results came back, that third test showed that she in fact did have the coronavirus, and so our demand in here is that going forward, the CDC will do three tests as opposed to two.”

Abbott’s office said the state made its requests in a letter sent to the CDC by John Hellerstedt, commissioner of the Texas Department of State Health Services. At the same time, Abbott said he had a conversation with Vice President Mike Pence, who is overseeing the coronavirus response for the White House, and that his office has had multiple discussions with federal staff.

Currently, there are 11 people remaining at the San Antonio quarantine who have tested positive for “very mild cases of the coronavirus,” Abbott said. No one in Texas has tested positive for the virus outside the quarantine.